World is getting happier. Western teenagers are not |
If you look only at the headlines, the world feels like it is falling apart. Wars, cost-of-living pressures, political polarisation.
Yet the data tells a different story. On average, humanity is becoming happier.
The latest World Happiness Report shows that in most countries, life satisfaction has improved in the past two decades.
Eastern Europe is catching up quickly. Large parts of the developing world are making steady progress. Even after a pandemic and multiple global shocks, most people rate their lives more positively today than they did in the late 2000s.
At the very top, nothing much has changed.
Finland remains No.1, followed by a familiar Nordic pack.
These countries continue to combine wealth, social trust and functioning institutions in a way that delivers consistently high life satisfaction.
So far, so reassuring.
But buried inside the report is a far more unsettling trend. It is not about countries. It is about age. It is a generational decline in happiness.
In most of the world, young people are doing fine. In many places, they are even happier than previous generations at the same age.
But in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada, along with much of Western Europe, the opposite is true. Young people have become significantly less happy in the past 15 years. In global rankings of youth wellbeing trends, these countries now sit near the bottom.
Let that sink in. Some of the richest, safest and most opportunity-rich societies in human history are producing some of the least happy young people.
That is not a small statistical quirk. It is a structural shift. Why are young people in rich Western countries unhappy?
Naturally, our attention turns to the usual suspect: Social media.
The report takes this question seriously and does not offer a simplistic, one-dimensional answer. Social media is not universally bad. But the pattern is remarkably consistent. Light users tend to report the highest life satisfaction. Heavy users report the lowest.
Teenagers who spend seven hours or more a day on........