For many years, economists might depend on a comforting graph about happiness over a lifetime: It adopted a U-shape, like a smile. Younger individuals had been carefree and blissful. Center age was tough however pleasure returned once more in previous age. This wasn’t a flimsy discovering. Greater than 600 tutorial papers, printed from 1980 to 2020, documented this up-down-up pattern in human psychology throughout 145 international locations.
Basic instance of a happiness U-curve from the U.Okay.
Then, in the course of the pandemic, many individuals seen that the younger weren’t so blissful anymore. There was a surge of youth psychological sickness, particularly anxiousness and despair. The U-shaped smile was quick disappearing globally and shifting right into a sneer.
David Blanchflower, a distinguished British-American labor economist at Dartmouth Faculty, has been finding out this decline in youth well-being and attempting to know it. Primarily based on giant surveys of psychological well being, he dates the beginning of the deterioration within the U.S. and the U.Okay. to round 2013, seven years earlier than the Covid pandemic and the isolation of lockdowns.
“That’s when smartphones got here alongside,” mentioned Blanchflower.
Social media would appear a logical perpetrator for the rise in distress. Smartphones had simply grow to be ubiquitous round that point, and critics like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt have argued that they’ve been rewiring adolescent brains for the more severe.
However when Blanchflower dug into the info, the smartphone story offered solely a partial rationalization. If social media had been the primary driver, you’d anticipate distress to rise amongst all younger individuals at roughly the identical fee. And whereas it’s true that ill-being elevated amongst all younger adults, Blanchflower found that the decline in well-being was concentrated amongst these younger adults who had been working, particularly females underneath 25. Faculty college students and others not working nonetheless confirmed one thing near the previous happiness curve, even when the left nook wasn’t fairly as upturned.
That raises a puzzling query: Why are younger employees so sad?
They’re not having hassle getting a job. Employment charges for 16- to 24-year-olds have risen since 2010. Their hours have elevated. Their relative wages have additionally risen. Blanchflower analyzed many years of U.S. survey knowledge on psychological well being and linked it to employment outcomes. His evaluation appeared in a working paper, not but printed in a peer-reviewed journal, however circulated by the Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis in January 2026.
This knowledge reveals that the rise in ill-being and fall in well-being are particularly giant for the youngest employees aged 18-22 over the past decade. And it confirms that non-workers this age, particularly school college students, aren’t as depressing. They’re nonetheless comparatively blissful. This diverging sample was true for the U.S. as a complete and in all 50 states between 2020 and 2025. What’s notably new, based on Blanchflower, is the sharp enhance in despair and distress amongst younger employees. He created this chart for me.
Despair can also be sharply stratified by training: Highschool dropouts fare far worse than school graduates, even these of the identical age.
However again to why. Blanchflower notes that job satisfaction among the many younger has fallen. A Convention Board survey reveals a persistent hole between youthful and older employees. In 2025, job satisfaction was 72 % amongst employees aged 55 and over and simply 57 % amongst these aged 18 to 24. Throughout a number of dimensions, younger employees fee their jobs as decrease high quality than older employees do, and report larger issue with job stability and making ends meet.
One interpretation is that younger individuals more and more have what anthropologist David Graeber memorably referred to as “bullshit jobs” — work that feels pointless, insecure and disconnected from any sense of goal. There’s no direct proof of that, however different researchers have argued that younger employees have borne the brunt of gig work, declining bargaining energy, and vanishing profession ladders. Fears of being changed by AI are additionally strongest among the many younger.
Earlier generations additionally usually landed boring first jobs and anxious about monetary safety. However expectations for work could have modified for members of Gen Z. Since round 2012, the share of younger individuals who say they anticipate their chosen work to be “extraordinarily satisfying” has fallen from about 40 % to nearer to 20 %. If work is not anticipated to ship that means or identification, its psychological payoff could also be decrease.
One other idea is that the psychological well being of right this moment’s younger employees started deteriorating after they had been nonetheless in highschool. That harm carried into maturity, making the transition from college to work more durable — particularly for these with out school credentials.
“The youngest employees, particularly these with none school, are hardest hit, and we don’t know why,” Blanchflower concludes in his paper.
Blanchflower’s research is a warning that one thing basic has gone fallacious as younger individuals enter the workforce. Policymakers must maintain this in thoughts as they create extra pathways to good jobs that don’t require school.
This story about younger grownup misery was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, unbiased information group centered on inequality and innovation in training. Join Proof Points and different Hechinger newsletters.
