For decades, economists could rely on a comforting graph of lifetime happiness: It follows a U-shape, like a smile. Young people are carefree and happy. Middle age is rough, but in old age the joy returns. This is not an untenable finding. More than 600 academic papers published between 1980 and 2020 document this top-down trend in human psychology in 145 countries.
A classic example of the U-shaped curve of happiness from the UK
Then, during the pandemic, many people noticed that young people weren’t as happy anymore. There is a surge in mental illness among teenagers, especially anxiety and depression. The U-shaped smile quickly disappeared and turned into a sneer.
David Blanchflower, a prominent British-American labor economist at Dartmouth College, has been studying the decline in youth happiness and trying to understand it. He traces the onset of deterioration in mental health in the US and UK to around 2013, seven years before the pandemic and lockdowns, according to a large-scale survey of mental health.
“That’s when the smartphone came along,” Blanchflower said.
Social media seems to be the inevitable culprit for the increased suffering. At the time, smartphones were just becoming ubiquitous, and critics like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that they were changing teenage brains for the worse.
But when Blanchflower dug into the data, the smartphone story only provided part of the explanation. If social media were the main driver, you would expect suffering to increase at roughly the same rate for all young people. While happiness is indeed increasing for all young people, Blanchflower found that the decline was concentrated among those in the workforce, especially women under 25. College students and others who are not working still show characteristics close to the old happiness curve, although the left corner is less upturned.
This raises a puzzling question: why young? Worker So unhappy?
They have no difficulty finding work. Since 2010, employment rates among 16- to 24-year-olds have increased. Their working hours have also increased. Their relative wages also increased. Blanchflower analyzed decades of U.S. mental health survey data and linked it to employment outcomes. His analysis, published in a working paper, has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal but was distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2026.
The data shows that over the past decade, rising discomfort and declining happiness have been particularly pronounced among the youngest workers, aged 18-22. It also confirms that non-workers in this age group, namely college students, are not as miserable. They are still relatively happy. This pattern of divergence holds true across the United States and in all 50 states between 2020 and 2025. What is particularly new, Blanchflower believes, is the dramatic increase in despair and misery among young workers. He made this chart for me.
Despair is also clearly stratified by educational attainment: high school dropouts fare much worse than college graduates, even their peers.
But back to why. Blanchflower noted that job satisfaction among young people has declined. A survey by The Conference Board shows a persistent gap between younger and older workers. By 2025, job satisfaction for workers aged 55 and older will be 72%, compared with only 57% for workers aged 18 to 24. Across multiple dimensions, younger workers rate job quality lower than older workers and face greater difficulties with job stability and making ends meet.
One explanation is that young people are increasingly taking what anthropologist David Graeber calls “shit jobs”—jobs that feel meaningless, insecure, and disconnected from any sense of purpose. While there is no direct evidence for this, other researchers believe that younger workers are bearing the brunt of gig work, reduced bargaining power and the disappearance of career ladders. Young people also have the strongest fear of being replaced by artificial intelligence.
Previous generations also often found boring first jobs and worried about financial security. But the expectations members of Generation Z have about work may have changed. Since around 2012, the proportion of young people who say they want their chosen job to be “very satisfying” has fallen from about 40% to nearly 20%. If work is no longer expected to convey meaning or identity, its psychological rewards may be lower.
Another theory is that the mental health of today’s young workers begins to deteriorate in high school. This damage persists into adulthood, making the transition from school to work more difficult—especially for those without a college degree.
“The youngest workers, especially those without college, are hardest hit, and we don’t know why,” Blanchflower concluded in his paper.
Blanchflower’s research warns that fundamental problems have emerged as young people enter the workforce. Policymakers need to keep this in mind as they create more pathways to good jobs that don’t require college.
This story about young people suffering is made of Heckinger Reportis a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. register proof point and others Heckinger Communications.
