20-05-2025
Are young people today really the saddest generation of the modern era?
'We have more fun, more sex, more money and more talent than our parents did,' read a feature in The Telegraph in May 1967. It was an extract from The Young Meteors, a book by author Jonathan Aitken, then 25, that charted the rise of famous 20-somethings in 1960s London. No wonder his peers were so gleeful: the economy was booming, university education had been made free and the contraceptive pill was newly available. There was a 'remarkable lack of professionalism' and ambition was 'not encouraged', Aitken wrote. Young life was all about enjoying yourself and putting off the hard stuff for later down the line.
Things couldn't have changed more for 25-year-olds in Britain today. Rents have soared and wages have plummeted. Regardless of talent, good jobs are scarce, and degrees are expensive to get. It makes sense then that young people today are partying less than they were in the 1980s or early 2000s, research suggests, and we're less likely to have had sex in the past month than our parents, too. According to this year's World Happiness Report, and The Lancet 's commission on adolescent health, under-25s are now less happy, less fulfilled, and more likely to have a mental illness than ever before. We are surely the most miserable generation ever to be young.
Or – are we? Aitken, who went on to be Britain's Defence Secretary in John Major's government, also wrote that many of his peers were 'schizophrenic and insecure'. They had everything they needed materially, but were still unable to find a 'satisfying and rewarding existence'. Far from being sadder and more anxious, 'young people today are just more serious and less hedonistic, and that's a good thing,' said Aitken, now 73, when I phoned him to ask how much had really changed. Unhappiness was common in the 1960s too, but 'the stiff upper lip had a lot to commend it', and between the existence of the welfare state and the NHS, life is 'softer now' for people my age than it was in the past.
Society is simply too 'self-indulgent' now, says Aitken, and plenty would agree. My generation complains more freely, it's often said. We're also less judgemental and more aware of mental illnesses like depression and anxiety, and more willing to admit when we have the symptoms of them ourselves, as one in five of us under-25s in Britain do, according to the NHS.
'Young people today certainly find it easier to talk about mental health than they did in the past,' says Bobby Duffy, a professor of public policy, the director of the Policy Institute at King's College London, and the author of The Generation Myth: Why When You're Born Matters Less Than You Think. 'The stigma in place in earlier decades likely contributed to the high rates of suicide in Gen X, today's 44-to-60-year-olds, when they were young.'
Dr Meg Jay, a psychologist and author of The Twentysomething Treatment, agrees, but adds that 'your late teens and 20s make up the most uncertain decade of life'. The brain she explains 'interprets that uncertainty as danger, which makes people feel anxious and depressed and stressed', she explains. These days, we're too quick to label this real distress as mental illness in young people, she believes. Labels and medication 'can be useful in some cases, but they're definitely overused and they have downsides'.
The happiness benefit that comes with youth seems to have disappeared
It's not just Gen Zs who're unhappy right now, however. A recent Ipsos poll found that Gen X remains the most likely generation to say that they're 'not very happy' or 'not happy at all', at 31 per cent of the age group across 30 countries. What's different is that there are 'some signs that happiness in young people is flattening in a way that it hasn't before,' Prof Duffy says. 'We haven't seen this effect in older generations, even millennials. It's evidence that young people today are facing a unique problem.'
One of those studies is the World Happiness Report, produced by a team that includes Prof Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, the director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. He agrees with Prof Duffy. Across the western world, the happiness benefit that comes with youth 'has really disappeared in today's generation,' he says. The extent of the change is the most obvious in children currently at school, where 'that first leg of the U-curve where people report being happiest in their teens is literally gone'. People in their 20s, meanwhile, are 'living their midlife crises right now'. Someone my age is about as happy as the average 45-year-old was in the year 2000, Prof De Neve estimates.
Is social media and the internet the root cause?
You might want to say that the flattening of the curve is all down to social media and smartphones. We're the first generation of adults to have grown up on the internet. In some ways, that instinct is right, research suggests. Children aged between 12 and 15 today who use social media for over three hours each day face twice the risk of having symptoms of depression and anxiety, according to a study from Yale university. According to a new report from IPPR, a think-tank, children with poor mental health are two thirds more likely to have reduced ability to work as adults, based on the lives of people born in 1970.
