Young people are becoming less happy than older generations as they suffer “the equivalent of a midlife crisis”, global research has revealed as America’s top doctor warned that “young people are really struggling”.
Dr Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, said allowing children to use social media was like giving them medicine that is not proven to be safe. He said the failure of governments to better regulate social media in recent years was “insane”.
Murthy spoke to the Guardian as new data revealed that young people across North America were now less happy than their elders, with the same “historic” shift expected to follow in western Europe.
Declining wellbeing among under-30s has driven the US out of the top 20 list of happiest nations, the 2024 World Happiness Report revealed.
I’d just like to mention that that is a very US-centric perspective. Of course it’s not social media, but in the 1950s the average person who was just graduating from the place I did was fighting the 8th Mechanized Army of the Soviet Union. Things did not improve immediately after.
Point is, the relative welfare of the US was built on the fact that Europe was devastated in WWII, and then squandered once the wealthy saw they can’t keep accumulating wealth at the same pace after Europe was back in one piece.
That said, the boom-bust cycle is seeing us worse and worse every iteration and the 100 obscenely wealthy people better and better off. So maybe that’s the problem.