For decades, economists could rely on a comforting graph of lifetime happiness: It followed a U shape, like a smile. The young people were carefree and happy. Middle age was hard, but joy returned in old age. This was not a smart find. More than 600 academic articles, published between 1980 and 2020, documented this upward trend in human psychology in 145 countries.
Classic UK Happiness U-Curve Example
Then, during the pandemic, many people noticed that young people were not as happy anymore. There was an increase in mental illness in young people, especially anxiety and depression. The U-shaped smile was rapidly disappearing globally and turning into a sneer.
David Blanchflower, a leading British-American labor economist at Dartmouth College, has been studying this decline in youth well-being and trying to understand it. Based on large mental health surveys, he dates the start of the deterioration in the United States and the United Kingdom to around 2013, seven years before the Covid pandemic and the isolation of lockdowns.
“That’s when smartphones came out,” Blanchflower said.
Social networks would seem a logical culprit for the increase in misery. Smartphones had become ubiquitous by that time, and critics such as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt have argued that they have been rewiring teenagers’ brains for the worse.
But when Blanchflower dug deeper into the data, the history of smartphones provided only a partial explanation. If social media were the main driver, misery would be expected to increase among all young people at roughly the same rate. And while it is true that distress increased among all young adults, Blanchflower found that the decline in well-being was concentrated among working young adults, especially women under 25. College students and other people who weren’t working still showed something close to the old happiness curve, even if the left corner wasn’t as steep.
This raises a puzzling question: why do young people workers so unhappy?
They have no problems getting a job. Employment rates for 16- to 24-year-olds have increased since 2010. Their hours have increased. Their relative salaries have also increased. Blanchflower analyzed decades of American survey data on mental health and linked it to employment outcomes. His analysis appeared in a work papernot yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, but distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2026.
These data show that the rise in unrest and decline in well-being are especially large for younger workers ages 18 to 22 over the past decade. And it confirms that non-workers of this age, that is, university students, are not so miserable. They are still relatively happy. This divergent pattern played out in the United States as a whole and in all 50 states between 2020 and 2025. What is particularly new, according to Blanchflower, is the sharp rise in desperation and misery among young workers. He created this graphic for me.
Despair is also sharply stratified by education: High school dropouts fare much worse than college graduates, even those of the same age.
But let’s get back to why. Blanchflower notes that job satisfaction among young people has declined. A Conference Board survey shows a persistent gap between younger and older workers. In 2025, job satisfaction was 72 percent among workers ages 55 and older and just 57 percent among those ages 18 to 24. Across multiple dimensions, younger workers rate their jobs as lower quality than older workers, and report greater difficulties with job stability and making ends meet.
One interpretation is that young people increasingly have what anthropologist David Graeber memorably called “bullshit jobs”: jobs that feel worthless, insecure, and disconnected from any sense of purpose. There is no direct evidence for this, but other researchers have argued that young workers have been most affected by informal work, declining bargaining power and the disappearance of career ladders. The fear of being replaced by AI is also greater among young people.
Previous generations also often got boring first jobs and worried about financial security. But job expectations may have changed for members of Generation Z. Since around 2012, the share of young people who say they expect their chosen job to be “extremely satisfying” has fallen from about 40 percent to about 20 percent. If work is no longer expected to provide meaning or identity, its psychological reward may be less.
Another theory is that the mental health of today’s young workers began to deteriorate when they were still in high school. That damage extended into adulthood, making the transition from school to work more difficult, especially for those without college credentials.
“Younger workers, especially those without college education, are the most affected and we don’t know why,” Blanchflower concludes in her article.
Blanchflower’s study is a warning that something fundamental has gone wrong as young people enter the workforce. Policymakers should keep this in mind when creating more pathways to good jobs that don’t require a college education.
This story about young adults. misery was produced by The Hechinger Reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Enroll in Test points and others Hechinger Newsletters.
