Actually, no, that’s hardly the whole story
Most young and young-ish people I’ve talked to lately seem to have given up on life.
The hairdresser who cuts my hair. The people I meet at the local leisure centre. The friends that, like me, try to stay afloat but find it harder and harder to do so.
London, where I live, has become near-unliveable for young people in the last couple of years. My brother, who lived in Toronto until recently and now lives in Miami, tells me pretty much the same story.
Unless you either got lucky landing a lucrative and stable job, still have your parents bankrolling your life — you’d be surprised how common this is in certain social circles — or have a wealthy relative who died recently, you likely dread stepping out of your house because you know that might cost you more than you can afford.
To be honest, I’m not even sure I have conversations with fellow Millenials and Gen Z — I’m on the cusp of the two cohorts — that do not involve worries about how things are and how much worse they could get.
According to the latest World Happiness Report, people under 30 in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, and a few other countries in the West are now experiencing the equivalent of a… mid-life crisis.
And if you were to believe countless think pieces on the decline of young people’s mental health — written almost exclusively by people who are definitely not in the same boat as us — this is mostly (or even solely) because of those bloody phones we’re all so addicted to.
That’s hardly the whole story, though, is it?
This is the first year that the World Happiness Report, a publication that conducts global surveys to report how people worldwide evaluate their own lives, has divided the data by age groups.
But it’s not just people under 30 in the West who struggle to maintain a positive outlook on life nowadays.
The report found that those born before 1965 — the Baby Boomers — were, on average, much happier than those born since 1980 — Millennials and Gen Z. And while for people in the older generations, life evaluations…