Think about a time when you were happy. What comes to mind? Was it a family game or movie night? Maybe you were hanging out with friends volunteering in your community. Or perhaps you were enjoying something beautiful — an amazing view or music that gave you goosebumps.
It’s probably not hard for many of us to come up with specific moments that felt joyful. But the question of whether we’re happy overall is much more complex. It involves weighing many factors in our lives, good and bad. And in that sense, many people — especially teens and young adults — seem unhappier than ever.
Young people, especially those in the United States, just aren’t as happy as they were 10 or 15 years ago. That’s according to the 2024 World Happiness Report, published by the University of Oxford in England.
This annual report is based on surveys that ask people around the globe how satisfied they are with their lives. Participants also answer questions about their positive and negative emotions from the day before the survey. Good feelings include things like laughter, enjoyment and how interested a person was in the activities they did. Negative emotions focus on sadness, anger and worry. The researchers who compile these reports look at how different emotions affect people’s life satisfaction.
The first report, released in 2012, used survey data from 2006 to 2010. With nearly two decades of data, scientists can now begin to track happiness trends for people of different ages or generations. It used to be that middle-aged adults were the least-happy age group.
But the 2024 report flipped that on its head: Teens in the United States are now the unhappiest group. In 2006 to 2010, young people’s reported happiness levels were about 7.3 on a scale from 0 to 10. In the most recent survey they were just 6.4. That drop put young people in the United States at a rank of 62 in terms of happiness, among 143 countries. Older Americans ranked…
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