Crap jobs, fewer homes, less money, toxic politics. And peak happiness eludes the young: who knew? | Zoe Williams

4 hours ago 1

So there are two studies, one commissioned by Weetabix, one by the UN, but we don’t need to decide which one is likely to be the more reliable because, praise be, they both say the same thing: 45 is now the age of peak happiness. A massive 77% are more content with their lives after they hit 40, with two-thirds saying they no longer cared what other people thought, and 59% having attained self-actualisation – or, at least, they say they “now know what really matters in life”. Which is probably about as self-actualised as it gets. That data is all from the high-fibre breakfast treat funded study.

The UN, meanwhile, has survey results from the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and kicks off cheerfully enough – happiness used to be conceived in a U-shape, when it was bliss to be alive in youth, miserable in middle age, and then picked up again as you got older. Now it’s more of a straight upward trajectory, although that can’t literally be true as it would make babies the saddest people on Earth. Fair play, they do cry a lot.

The problem with the UN’s research is that it’s pretty clear about what’s driving this change, and – newsflash – it isn’t pilates. The economist David Blanchflower, co-author with the academic psychologist Jean Twenge, is blunt: there’s a “crisis in wellbeing among the young”. They’ve become isolated, they don’t go out, they’re not carefree, they don’t have sex. Separate research has demonstrated, repeatedly, that there’s a mental health crisis in the under-35s, with more than 500,000 excluded from the workforce. The proportion of young people out of work owing to mental health problems has nearly doubled since 2012. It’s possible that people hit peak happiness at 45 just by dint of the tremendous good fortune of not being younger than 45.

There are so many explanations for this that crumble as soon as you pick them up. Covid is often thought to have hit the young harder: it disrupted school and warped exam results; those at university paid the price for the best years of their lives without actually enjoying them; those just starting work missed out on the comradeship and knowledge-sharing of offices. Blanchflower contends that the trend started before 2020, however, and didn’t end when normal life resumed – so it must be something else, maybe social media use, cyberbullying, online body shaming.

Trying to make sense of that, people in their 40s and 50s often fall back on the snowflake hypothesis. If these features of modern life – which the rest of us manage OK – have overwhelmed one generation, maybe they’re just not robust? Too hung up on identity politics, too easily offended, too ready to protest over offence they’ve taken, too keen to diagnose themselves with things, and then too strident in asking for allowances – just too fragile for the world. I’ve heard variations on this from people who work alongside gen Z and younger millennials for so long I started to take it on trust. I only ever spoke to those young ’uns on the phone, when they seemed like regular, resilient humans. But what did I know? I worked at home.

Increasingly, though, these narratives seem more like elevator music – soothing, formless – than coherent melody; it’s just not plausible that digital natives would be so much more affected by online behaviour when they’re so much cannier about it. There are much more obvious explanations, which young people will freely volunteer: student debt, the immense barriers to well-paid work for those without a degree, the fact that even putatively high quality jobs are no longer secure, and the fact that wages have stagnated yet housing costs have done the opposite.

Of course there are variations within the generation, but the overall picture is that life is simply much harder. Generational wealth transfer will bake in existing inequalities, and middle class millennials are set to gain most – but real distribution happens through inheritance, which is to say, not when you’re young. More likely, when you’re about 45.

Young people face hard-scrabble living standards, a political discourse that says it’s your own fault for buying too many lattes, and a wellness culture that centres individual discipline. It seems the only way to keep yourself sane is to organise collectively. As soon as you do, though, you’re most likely to join the fight against the climate crisis, where you find yourself in the same position: the only generation without blinkers on.

Is it really happiness, for the over-40s, if it’s powered by denial (also, according to Weetabix, hiking)? Or is denial what any generation would choose, if their material conditions allowed it? Either way, I suspect the range of and capacity for joy is the same across every age group; we’re the same people, dealing with different facts.