Researchers sound the alarm Young adults are unhappier today than ever before

An international study shows a dramatic trend reversal: While unhappiness used to be highest in middle age, young adults are now the unhappiest age group.

Keystone-SDA

28.08.2025, 18:50

SDA

Young adults today are on average significantly unhappier than they were for years. A team led by happiness researcher David Blanchflower from Dartmouth College in Hanover (USA) describes a trend reversal in the scientific journal "PLOS One".

For a long time, people's dissatisfaction could be represented as a kind of hill: It increased with some fluctuations up to the middle age of around 50 years - the so-called "rush hour" of life - and then decreased again significantly. This applied to both industrialized and developing countries, as has been investigated in various studies.

In other words, young and old people were doing well on average, while middle-aged people, who often juggle a career, raising children and possibly caring for the elderly at the same time, were doing worse - worry, depression and stress were more common among them. So far, so normal. Now the curve looks roughly different: Young adults are the most unhappy, people become happier in old age. This result confirms earlier studies from this year.

Younger people have problems worldwide

For the current study, the researchers analyzed extensive survey data on the mental health of adults in the UK and the USA. In addition, similar data from the so-called "Global Minds" study of almost two million people from 42 other countries was included, from which, according to the team, it can be deduced that the change described is a global phenomenon.

The study shows for the USA and the UK that "mental health problems are most common among young people and decrease with age", the authors write. "This is a huge change from the past, when mental health problems peaked in middle age."

The averaged US data for the period from 2009 to 2018 still shows the familiar hill from young to old, but the data for the period from 2019 to 2024 shows the new trend towards later satisfaction. The level of dissatisfaction in the middle-aged age group did not fall excessively, meaning that the change in the trend was mainly due to the enormous deterioration in the condition of younger people.

Experts are concerned

Macroeconomist and happiness researcher Karlheinz Ruckriegel from the Nuremberg Institute of Technology considers the results of the study to be "very worrying". Other studies have already shown similar trends, he says. "The evidence is striking," he says in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

But why are younger people so much worse off today than they were a few years ago?

"The reasons for this change are controversial, but we are concerned that there is a serious mental health crisis among young people today that needs to be addressed," write study author Blanchflower and his colleagues - and cite three possible reasons:

In contrast to the consequences of the financial crisis, independent researcher Ruckriegel sees excessive use of social media as a major influencing factor. Young people are constantly comparing themselves with others or with unrealistic ideals. "We know that these comparisons are highly problematic for our well-being."

Sociologist Hilke Brockmann from Bremen's Constructor University sees this in a similar light and believes it is also a reason why dissatisfaction is particularly pronounced among girls and young women. In social media, girls are often reduced to their appearance or sexualized, and they are also much more likely to be victims online. In addition, the networks provoke them to compare themselves not only with the other girls in their own clique, but with far more other people, including figures that don't really exist, explains the researcher. "The whole world becomes my peer group. The pressure to fit in and pass is brutal."

Study has methodological weaknesses

However, Brockmann also sees some flaws in the study's methodology: the data analysis is not suitable for making statements about whether the observed correlations with mental health are actually triggered by age and not perhaps by other independent factors - such as the spread of smartphones or the war in Ukraine.

It is also conceivable that these observed effects are only limited to a cohort of young people, such as those who were in puberty during the coronavirus period and suffered particularly severely from the restrictions. "That's why we don't know now: will younger people continue to have more fragile mental health in the future or is this perhaps just a temporary phenomenon? My guess - and hope - would be the latter," says Brockmann. However, longer-term changes cannot be deduced from the data.

Crisis, wars, climate change

Both Brockmann and Ruckriegel confirm the major influence of the coronavirus pandemic and also consider it likely that the gloomy, unpredictable global situation with wars and the climate crisis is also having an impact.

The question remains: is the possible trend reversal actually a bad thing? After all, satisfaction seems to increase over a person's lifetime.

However, the research team points out the far-reaching effects of mental health problems - from associated physical problems to school performance or participation in the labor market. Brockmann also emphasizes: "Adolescence is a particularly important stage of life. If you lose young people to mental illness at this age, you may lose them for life."

Only recently, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) presented an analysis according to which the proportion of those who classify their well-being as low is particularly high among 18 to 29-year-olds, at almost 40 percent. Among 65- to 79-year-olds, the figure was only around 17 percent. In addition, an analysis presented in the journal "Nature Mental Health" showed that the well-being index remained essentially the same on average in the 22 countries surveyed up to the age of 50 and only increased with age. Younger age groups apparently have more problems than previous generations, writes the team of this study.