Unhappy Youngsters

Why are so many youngsters unhappy, and what can we do about it? Earlier this month, Arthur C. Brooks attempted to answer the question in a post appearing in The Atlantic. Brooks writes,

“We’ve heard a lot lately about how miserable young Americans are. In the recently released World Happiness Report, the United States dropped to its lowest ranking since that survey began – and that result was driven by the unhappiness of people under 30 in this country. So what’s going on?”

“I have some skepticism about these international rankings of happiness. The organizations that produce them always attract a lot of attention by answering ‘Which is the world’s happiest country?’ They derive that answer – usually Finland, with Denmark and other Nordics close behind – by getting people in multiple countries to answer a single self-assessment question about life satisfaction. I don’t place much stock in this methodology because we can’t accurately compare nations based on such limited self-assessment: People in different cultures will answer in different ways.”\

“But I am very interested in the change within countries, such as the falling happiness of young adults in America. New research digs deeply into this issue, and many others: The Global Flourishing Study, based on a survey undertaken by a consortium of institutions including my Harvard colleagues at the Human Flourishing Program. This survey also uses self-reporting, but it collects much more comprehensive data on well-being, in about half a dozen distinct dimensions and in 22 countries, from more than 200,000 individuals whom it follows over five years. Most significant to me, the survey shows that although young people’s emotional and psychological distress is more pronounced in wealthy, industrialized nations such as the United States, it is occurring across the world.”

“Scholars have long noted that happiness tends to follow a U-shape across the lifespan: Self-reported happiness declines gradually in young and middle adulthood, then turns upward later in life, starting around the age 50. The Dartmouth University economist David G. Blanchflower – who, together with his co-author, Andrew J. Oswald, pioneered the U-shape hypothesis in 2008 – has reproduced the result in 145 countries.”

“The left-hand side of the U-shape would suggest that adolescents and young adults were traditionally, on average, happier than people in middle age. But given the well-documented increase over the past decades in diagnosed mood disorders among adolescents and young adults, we might expect that left side to be pushed down in newer estimates. And sure enough, this is exactly what the new GFS study finds, in the U.S. and around the world: The flourishing scores don’t fall from early adulthood, because they now start low; they start low until they start to rise at the expected age.”

“That’s the bad news, which is plenty bad. But there is some good news. The flourishing survey discovers one notable exception to this global pattern: a more traditional U-shaped curve among those young people who have more friends and intimate social relationships. This dovetails with my own research into how young adults in today’s era of technologically mediated socializing are lacking real-life human contact and love – without which no one can truly flourish. This exception created by greater human connection is the starting point for how we might address this pandemic of young people’s unhappiness.”

…

“The Global Flourishing Study exposes many interesting patterns and will undoubtedly stimulate additional research for years to come. But you don’t have to wait for that to apply the findings to your life – especially if you are a young adult living in a wealthy, post-industrial country. Here are three immediate things you can do:

Put close relationships with family and friends before virtually everything else. Where possible, avoid using technological platforms for interactions with these loved ones; focus on face-to-face contact. Humans are made to relate to one another in person.

Consider how you might develop your inner life. Given the trend toward being a none [Americans who profess no religion], …this might seem a countercultural move. But let’s define spirituality broadly as beliefs, practices, and experiences not confined to organized religion – even a philosophical journey that can help you transcend the daily grind and find purpose and meaning.

Material comforts are great, but they’re no substitute for what your heart really needs. Money can’t buy happiness; only meaning can give you that.”

“That last is a truism, I know. But truisms do have the merit of being true – and the flourishing survey reveals how we’re in danger of forgetting these important verities. Sometimes, the cold, hard data are what we need to remind us of what we always knew but had come to overlook.”

How would today’s school or tomorrow’s learning organization look if relationships, humanist spirituality, and developing your own and others’ internal meaning were the basis for what was learned and how it was learned?

Because, in the end, it doesn’t make a lot of difference if you can solve a calculus problem successfully if you can’t get along with your next door neighbor.

Til tomorrow. SVB