What The Hell America!

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We’ve heard a lot lately about how miserable young Americans are. In the recently released World Happiness Report, the United States dropped to its lowest ranking since that survey began—and that result was driven by the unhappiness of people under 30 in this country. So what’s going on?

I have some skepticism about these international rankings of happiness. The organizations that produce them always attract a lot of attention by answering “Which is the world’s happiest country?” They derive that answer—usually Finland, with Denmark and other Nordics close behind—by getting people in multiple countries to answer a single self-assessment question about life satisfaction. I don’t place much stock in this methodology because we can’t accurately compare nations based on such limited self-assessment: People in different cultures will answer in different ways.

But I am very interested in the change within countries, such as the falling happiness of young adults in America. New research digs deeply into this issue, and many others: The Global Flourishing Study, based on a survey undertaken by a consortium of institutions including my Harvard colleagues at the Human Flourishing Program. This survey also uses self-reporting, but it collects much more comprehensive data on well-being, in about half a dozen distinct dimensions and in 22 countries, from more than 200,000 individuals whom it follows over five years. Most significant to me, the survey shows that although young people’s emotional and psychological distress is more pronounced in wealthy, industrialized nations such as the United States, it is occurring across the world.

Scholars have long noted that happiness tends to follow a U-shape across the lifespan: Self-reported happiness declines gradually in young and middle adulthood, then turns upward later in life, starting around age 50. The Dartmouth University economist David G. Blanchflower—who, together with his co-author, Andrew J. Oswald, pioneered the U-shape hypothesis in 2008—has reproduced the result in 145 countries.

The left-hand side of the U-shape would suggest that adolescents and young adults were traditionally, on average, happier than people in middle age. But given the well-documented increase over the past decades in diagnosed mood disorders among adolescents and young adults, we might expect that left side to be pushed down in newer estimates. And sure enough, this is exactly what the new GFS study finds, in the U.S. and around the world: The flourishing scores don’t fall from early adulthood, because they now start low; they stay low until they start to rise at the expected age.

That’s the bad news, which is plenty bad. But there is some good news. The flourishing survey discovers one notable exception to this global pattern: a more traditional U-shaped curve among those young people who have more friends and intimate social relationships. This dovetails with my own research into how young adults in today’s era of technologically mediated socializing are lacking real-life human contact and love—without which no one can truly flourish. This exception created by greater human connection is the starting point for how we might address this pandemic of young people’s unhappiness.

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A plausible explanation for the more pronounced happiness problem that wealthy Western countries like the U.S. have is growing secularization—measured in the increasing numbers of so-called nones, people who profess no religious affiliation. In the United States, the percentage of the population with no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 2007, to 29 percent. Scholars have long found that religious people are, on average, happier than nonreligious people.

How to account for this paradox that a practice that gives so many people a tangible well-being boost is in such clear decline? Researchers have hypothesized that the phenomenon’s predominance in well-to-do countries is essentially a function of that affluence: As society grows richer, people become less religious because they no longer need the comfort of religion to cope with such miseries as hunger and early mortality.

I have my doubts about this economic-determinist account. As one would expect from past studies, the new survey shows that people who attend a worship service at least weekly score, on worldwide average, 8 percent higher in flourishing measures than nonattenders. But it further reveals that this positive effect is strongest among the richest and most secular nations. This finding suggests that, contrary to the materialist hypothesis, wealth is not a great source of metaphysical comfort—and the well-being effect of religious attendance is relatively independent of economic factors.

This leads to the question of what exactly is missing for so many people in wealthy countries when religion declines. Community connection and social capital are two answers. But a deeper answer is meaning, one of the study’s categories of flourishing, which it measures by asking participants whether they feel their daily activities are worthwhile and whether they understand their life’s purpose. GDP per capita, the survey finds, is inversely correlated with this sense of meaning: The wealthier a country gets, the more bereft of meaning its citizens feel.

Others have previously observed this pattern as well. Researchers writing in the journal Psychological Science in 2013 looked at a far larger sample of nations (132) and came to the same conclusion as the GFS: In answer to the question “Do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning?,” respondents to the survey in higher-income nations expressed much weaker conviction than those in lower-income countries. The researchers also found that these results were likely explained by secularism in richer nations.

This raises the issue of whether something about material success in a society naturally drives down religion or spirituality, and thus meaning, and so also flourishing. Many writers and thinkers throughout history have made this case, of course. Indeed, we could go back to the Bible and the New Testament story in which a rich young man asks Jesus what he needs to do to gain admission to heaven. Jesus tells the young man to sell all he has, give it to the poor, and follow him. “At this the man’s face fell,” the Gospel says. “He went away sad, because he had great wealth.”

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The Global Flourishing Study exposes many interesting patterns and will undoubtedly stimulate additional research for years to come. But you don’t have to wait for that to apply the findings to your life—especially if you are a young adult living in a wealthy, post-industrial country. Here are three immediate things you can do:

That last is a truism, I know. But truisms do have the merit of being true—and the flourishing survey reveals how we’re in danger of forgetting these important verities. Sometimes, the cold, hard data are what we need to remind us of what we always knew but had come to overlook.