Gen Z misery, explained in one chart

The kids, it’s been suggested, are not okay.

For decades, established research showed that happiness and well-being levels tend to peak during youth in your late teens and 20s, drop during midlife, and rise again in old age. But this U-shaped happiness curve is now morphing, according to the results from a recent global study: Many of the world’s young people are not flourishing.

“Young people — and this is a universal finding — in general, are not doing well,” says Byron Johnson, the director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and a co-author of the study. “That U is becoming a J. It’s flattening. That’s cause for concern, not just here in the United States, but it’s cause for concern all over the world.”

The results come from the Global Flourishing Study, a multiyear project from researchers at Harvard and Baylor that uses survey data from Gallup to measure levels of well-being worldwide. Data was collected between 2022 and 2024 from over 200,000 adults in 23 countries and territories. To measure flourishing, researchers surveyed participants in core areas such as happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships. Taken together, these dimensions represent the Flourishing Index Score, or how much a person is said to be flourishing. (Financial and material stability also play a role in flourishing, but were excluded when examining the relationship between flourishing and age.)

In the US and many other geographically and culturally diverse countries, young people between the ages of 18 and 29 do not appear to be flourishing. In Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, flourishing increases with age. The gulf between young and old is most pronounced in the US, researchers found.

The findings are not universal. Hong Kong and Japan show the traditional U-shaped course of flourishing, while in India, Israel, Kenya, Poland, and Tanzania, flourishing decreases throughout the lifespan.

In the United States, the results of the study echo other research that shows young people are struggling. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 40 percent of high school students reported feeling consistently hopeless or sad in 2023, compared to 30 percent in 2013. Nearly half of Gen Z report often or always feeling anxious, per a 2023 Gallup and Walton Family Foundation survey. The American Psychological Association’s 2023 Stress in America survey found young people experience more stress than older cohorts. Today’s young people are lonelier than previous generations, another study found.

As additional waves of data are analyzed, researchers can identify what causes young people to struggle, Johnson says. Early observations have shown that religious service attendance contributes to flourishing.

“It could be that regular religious service attendance gives people purpose, maybe it gives them meaning in their life, and these are major factors in flourishing,” Johnson says. “But maybe it also gives them support networks.”

Young people’s lack of engagement in group activities more broadly could be impacting their well-being, Johnson says. Despite ranking highly in financial security, countries like the US and Germany fall behind in areas like close relationships, meaning, and purpose. Meanwhile, societal emphasis on individualism may make young people less inclined to engage with and support their neighbors and peers.

“Once you really, seriously think of others,” Johnson says, “instead of just focusing on yourself, it is, in fact, a game changer for so many people.”

Social media is commonly cited as a culprit of young people’s suffering, and Johnson believes it plays a role, due to the negative impacts of comparison online and forgoing in-person socializing for digital connection. But isn’t the sole contributor, he says.

It could also be that young people’s flourishing levels improve with age, time, and change in circumstances. Researchers will continue to survey the same sample of participants over the next few years to find out, Johnson says.

“What about the woman that we interviewed just last year that said she wasn’t flourishing?” Johnson says. “Then next year, she actually finds out she’s having a child. Her whole world now has changed.”