Young people are becoming less happy than older generations as they experience “the equivalent of a midlife crisis,” global research released yesterday revealed, as the US’ top doctor warned that “young people are really struggling.”
Allowing children to use social media was like giving them medicine that is not proven to be safe, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said, adding that the failure of governments to better regulate social media in the past few years was “insane.”
Murthy comments came as new data revealed that young people across North America were now less happy than their elders, with the same “historic” shift expected to follow in western Europe.
Photo: AFP
Declining well-being among under-30s has driven the US out of the top 20 list of happiest nations, this year’s World Happiness Report showed.
After 12 years in which people aged 15 to 24 were measured as being happier than older generations in the US, the trend appears to have flipped in 2017.
The gap has also narrowed in western Europe and the same change could happen in the coming year or two, experts say.
Murthy described the report findings as a “red flag that young people are really struggling in the US and now increasingly around the world.”
He said he was still waiting to see data that proved social media platforms were safe for children and adolescents, and called for international action to improve real-life social connections for young people.
The World Happiness Report, an annual barometer of well-being in 140 nations coordinated by the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network showed “disconcerting drops [in youth happiness] especially in North America and western Europe,” center director and editor of the study Jan-Emmanuel De Neve said.
“To think that in some parts of the world children are already experiencing the equivalent of a midlife crisis, demands immediate policy action,” De Neve said.
The falling well-being scores for North America (in a grouping that includes Australia and New Zealand) “contradicts a well-established notion ... that kids start out happier before they slide down the U-curve towards a mid-life crisis before [well-being] picks up again,” he said.
Britons younger than 30 ranked 32nd in the rankings, behind nations such as Moldova, Kosovo and even El Salvador, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates.
By contrast Britons older than 60 made it into the top 20 of the world’s happiest older generations. Earlier this month a majority of British teenagers told pollsters they expect their lives to be worse than the previous generation.
The US fell eight places in the overall happiness rankings to 23rd, but when only those younger than 30 were asked, the world’s richest nation ranked 62nd — behind Guatemala, Saudi Arabia and Bulgaria. If the views of only people aged 60 and older were accounted for, the US was the 10th happiest nation.
“For the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, happiness has decreased in all age groups, but especially for the young, so much so that the young are now, in 2021-2023, the least happy age group,” the report found.
In 2010 the young were happier than those in midlife.
The report does not reveal the causes of the changes, but they come amid increasing concern at the effects of rising social media use, income inequalities, the housing crisis, and fears about war and climate change on the happiness of children and young people.
Murthy said that US adolescents were spending nearly five hours a day on social media on average and one-third were staying up until midnight on week nights on their devices.
He called for legislation “now” to reduce harms to young people from social media including limiting or eliminating features such as “like” buttons and “infinite scrolling.”
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