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.
Even if you just consume the correct media, no fake news and no tiktok brain melting dopamine rush content, you still find out more about the world and what’s going wrong by two clicks. Be it the climate catastrophe, carcinogenic food and materials, war going on or simple economy crisis. That’s all my grandparents didn’t have to read or to deal with in such an excessive way. Large news made it the tv news and local issues never had this huge impact on their lives. Print was slow and compacted.
You could say ignorance is a bliss. Now add all the dopamine killers and you get a toxic cocktail, that our brain can’t handle. We jump from one extreme to the other and can hardly escape it.
The only solution is a healthy abstinence from most news for most of the day, activities counteracting bad events (like community work or going into politics) and avoiding all dopamine rush things. I bet we could also make school (and later work) feel less shit, so we’re less inclined into counteracting by indulging into bad habits.
There’s a lot of pressure on young people and we’ve yet to gasp this. The first generation who had to deal with all of this at once, are only approaching their 30s. Give it another 30 and they might be into the positions to effect things for the better. But I see at least 3 more decades of things getting worse.
My father: High school diploma, homeowner, family man, good retirement.
Me: Good STEM degree, can’t afford home, can’t afford family, can’t afford retirement.
This article (and you): Why would social media do this?