Youth is in crisis. A new study commissioned by the UN has confirmed what anyone who has met a 20-something recently already knew: it’s depressing being young in 2025.
You might imagine that angst and youth have always gone hand in hand, but that’s not the full picture. Until a decade or so ago, happiness followed a predictable U-shaped trajectory. Over the average life, our forebears could expect to feel footloose and fancy free in early adulthood, less content in middle age as the demands of work and family peaked, before sliding blissfully into the low-pressure lagoon of later life.
Not so today, when being young directly correlates with feeling worse. According to the paper, the older we are, the happier we get. So allow me to offer a positive spin: with life satisfaction now increasing with age, at least the only way is up.
square EMILY WATKINS
Yes, university is a waste of money - but you should still go
Read MoreIt’s easy to theorise about the factors behind young people’s discontent – they are, after all, entering adulthood just as the planet really begins to sizzle. Thanks to runaway housing markets and economic crashes, many will never get to enjoy the markers of maturity that our parents took for granted.
Meanwhile, the rise of smartphones and social media mean that we’re ruthlessly comparing ourselves to more people than ever, without the face to face social interactions that put such comparisons into perspective.
It’s a heady cocktail, even before you remember that young people are having less sex, drinking less alcohol, and generally having less fun than any generation in living memory. No blowing off steam, no future to look forward to – having done away with every time-honoured coping mechanism for sublimating the grinding pointlessness of life, is it any wonder that we’re miserable?
Thing is, the world has always been awful. Our ancestors dealt with war, disasters and death at much higher rates than most of us could ever imagine; dictators aren’t new, neither is prejudice, or economic instability. It might be sparse comfort, but I personally find it helpful to remind myself that, whatever I’m facing down in either my private life or as a citizen of the planet, none of it is new.
What has changed, as far as I can tell, is not how bad things are, but the degree to which we’re immersed in them. Life is stupid and scary, yet while we used to have to no choice but to embrace it, today it’s all too tempting to bury one’s young, untethered head in a smartphone or childhood pillow; temporary relief, but ultimately unfulfilling. Luckily, as life goes on, it forces you to participate in increasingly hands-on ways.
The older you are, the more likely you are to have experiences and relationships than embed you in the world – a career, a child, a jolt of tragedy that pushes you to reevaluate your whole life and move to Panama. And while none of those things are original or clever, they have reliably given human beings a scaffold over which to hang meaning for millennia.
Historically, we’ve used tradition and religion to frame life’s biggest moments –but even if those structures feel as irrelevant to you as they do to me, the actual content remains as compelling as ever (a baby is still amazing without a christening; love is still beautiful without a church wedding).
There is nothing inherently meaningful about making a friend or having an adventure – rather, significance comes from the inside out, projected onto an experience by the person having it. If you want your life to feel meaningful, fill it with things, and your brain will do the rest.
Living with parents long into adulthood and shoring up their skin with endless treatments, this generation seems almost pathologically resistant to ageing — ironically, that perpetual youth is what’s making them unhappy. As such, even if the solution sounds counterintuitive, it’s gloriously simple: grow up!
The world might feel unpredictable, but the one thing anyone alive can count on is getting older. While society in 2025 might seem to be conspiring to keep young people in a protracted state of adolescence, time acts on us all, whether we like it or not. Sooner or later, life interrupts inertia and pulls you in.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( How can young people be happy? They need to grow up )
Also on site :
- Oscar Winner Stuns On The Red Carpet As The Cannes ‘Godmother’ — What The Prestigious Title Means
- Is Apple Pay Down? What We Know About the Widespread Outages
- NJ Transit workers go on strike after wage increase talks stall