Gareth O'Callaghan: Cool in 1976, crushed in 2024 — where did teen joy go?

Irish Examiner

24-05-2025

American fiction writer Harlan Coben once said: 'Make no mistake. Adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed.'
Truer words were never spoken, I was reminded last week while reading the UN report from Unicef which finds that Irish teenagers are among the least happy in high-income countries despite leading the world in academic skills.
Why is one in every three 15-year-olds reporting low-life satisfaction, while our youth suicide rate is now above the international average?
In order to answer the question, I spent a couple of hours during the week rowing back the years, trying to recall the 15-year-old I once was half a century ago. What surprised me as I jotted down random memories, despite the hormonal challenges everyone faces at that time in life, was that 1976 felt like the happiest of all my teenage years.
It was a scorching hot summer, with temperatures reaching 32 degrees at the end of June. I had just completed my first big exam — the Inter Cert, as it was known then — and I felt not just relief, but also a sense of independence and identity for the first time in my life.
Everything about me was changing — a weird sensation I had no control over. It was the summer I smoked my first cigarette, and promptly got violently sick. I kissed a girl for the first time, and instantly fell in love with her — or so I thought.
I listened to Radio Luxembourg into the early hours of the morning. I learned the words of every song on the Eagles Their Greatest Hits album, and — to paraphrase one of them — there were moments I felt that peaceful easy feeling. Life was 'cool'.
They were different times that bear no comparison to my world today, or, for that matter, the world of a modern 15-year-old
Technology back then consisted of a landline telephone, a radio and a television, a portable cassette player, and the kitchen fridge — let's not forget antibiotics; each one a seismic shift that changed life for the better.
I had no idea that the world was on the cusp of a technological explosion. If something didn't exist, then you didn't miss it. And perhaps that's what made the life of this 15-year-old so incompatible with how I imagine life would be if I were that age again today.
The world's first mobile phone.
In 1976, the world's first mobile phone, Motorola's DynaTAC 8000X, was three years old. Elon Musk was five, Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even born. Bruce Jenner, who won gold and broke the decathlon world record in the Montreal Olympics, was a man. Concorde crossed the Atlantic in three hours, while the Space Shuttle was within months of launching. Amazon was an endangered rainforest in South America, and a scientist called David Wong was busy inventing an important drug he would call Prozac 12 years later.
Technology had two new visionaries — both 21 years old. Steve Jobs had just invented the world's first personal computer, while Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft.
I knew little about these people or their stories 49 years ago. Life for a 15-year-old in 1976 was uncluttered. From the time you left home every morning until you arrived back, you were out of contact. It was all about a newfound sense of freedom, and a realisation that a more satisfying life was in your own making, at your own pace.
We read books and newspapers. We wrote using biros or fountain pens. We made do with what we needed, never questioning why we couldn't have what we wanted. Life's luxuries came with a price, namely hard work, as my parents taught me.
I got my first job that summer, stacking shelves in a busy grocery shop. It wasn't very exciting, but as a teenager there was nothing to beat being handed your wages in cash on a Friday.
Was I suffering from low-life satisfaction when I was 15? Not that I recall. My memories tell me those were mostly good days. So what has changed?
Low-life satisfaction focuses on an individual's overall rating of how they value life connections such as relationships, work, and personal achievements. It's a subjective measure of contentment, fulfilment, and happiness that a person experiences. If low-life satisfaction goes unchecked, it leads to depression.
Some 12,801 prescriptions for antidepressants were issued for children aged 12 to 15 years old in 2022, according to HSE figures, with the gender divide between boys and girls almost equally split. While the psychological effects of covid played a considerable role in this huge rise in psychiatric medication, it can't have been the only governing factor. Something had to give, and the pandemic became the catalyst.
Perhaps the strongest indicator of life satisfaction in those mid-teen years is the relationships we have with family and friends, and how fulfilling they are. When I was 15, I had five great friends, all male. That summer, a day never passed without the six of us getting together. Looking back, it was just how life was. My parents' authority was never questioned. Respect was expected in all aspects of life. In turn, it became a two-way street.
Life satisfaction's most important indicator is no different today for 15-year-olds to what it was 50 years ago, namely quality and quantity of social connections.
So what has changed? Simple — it's how we connect these days, and the monster we connect to
Young teenagers are now spending up to nine hours online every day — about the same time it takes to fly from Dublin to San Francisco. It's longer than most people sleep every night. That works out at 137 days every year achieving little or nothing. Personal achievement is also a major indicator of life satisfaction.
If you spend nine hours a day boozing in a pub or placing bets on horses, there aren't many people who wouldn't say you have a chronic problem. So why don't parents whose teenagers spend nine hours online feel the same?
Two reasons. Adults spend on average seven hours per day on screens connected to the internet, so it's fair to assume they're not even aware their own children are doing the same. Then there's the toxic concept of over-accommodating parenting.
If you always give in or accommodate the demands and needs of others, including your children, over your own, then you're what's known as an over-accommodating scapegoat. It comes from a combination of avoiding conflict and a need to feel accepted that enables others to use you as a doormat. Anyone who says 'anything for peace' is over-accommodating.
A family that collectively spends the equivalent of days at a time endlessly scrolling on Google, Instagram, Facebook, X — whatever you're having — is dysfunctional; which means there are no equals. It's a power-hierarchy household struggle, a pecking order of winners and losers, the strong versus the weak.
Some 12,801 prescriptions for antidepressants were issued for children aged 12 to 15 years old in 2022.
While they won't admit it, most parents know their teenage sons are watching porn online; but have they any idea the effects it's having on them? 'Ah, sure it's part of growing up, isn't it?' a father said to me. It's not.
Parents who don't make rules shouldn't expect respect from teenagers — who, by the way, are not adults, much as they might like to think they are. Parents who feel they are no longer important in the lives of their teenage children will quickly discover they're right.
It's worrying that a third of all 15-year-olds experience low-life satisfaction; but that's just an open-ended statistic if the mental health backdrop of the combined family is not taken into account. If parents can't acknowledge or deal with their own low-life satisfaction, then what hope does their 15-year-old son or daughter have? My tried-and-tested advice to anyone who's experiencing low-life satisfaction right now is to realise that your life doesn't get better by chance, it gets better by change. As Oscar Wilde once said: 'Be yourself; everyone else is already taken'.
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