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youth is no longer one of the happiest times

Which has always had the strong whiff of bullshit marketing imposed by patronizing adults, trying to force a square peg into the round hole.

Like the guy said at the end of the '93 comedy film Dazed & Confused - "If I ever start referring to these as the happiest days of my life, remind me to kill myself", and he was the cool, open-minded star athlete, the one best equipped to have a good time in his youth.

The biggest lie I was ever told was "these are the best years of your life" growing up, and frankly that made me want to end it all. Things have ONLY been uphill since the end of high school.

Kids and teenagers especially are all awful creatures. School showed me that, then six years in the pet industry watching how they behave around animals solidified it for me.

This is why we need to continue to relax our child labor laws. The youth will be happiest when they can have a steady job in the mines, again.

(This is sarcasm.)

Those of us raised by narcissists didn't have a "curve". It's been a flat line my entire life. /traumaDump

For what reason could a child in 2025 be upset?

Maybe it's the dying world? The dying society? Our dying economy? Our dying species?

We are seriously fucking up by not executing the rich before they guarentee the collapse of our support systems, and the extinction of our species and all large animal life on earth.

This is so fucking disgusting to me, that this has been done to us, that youth and joy have been corrupted and siphoned off and manipulated and taken from us.

I don't know if it's the wording used here or the actual study itself, but this all just seems wrong somehow. Like I'm not arguing against the fact that everything is completely fucked everywhere at the moment, and that obviously hits the youth hardest. But the way this is framed is just kinda stupid I feel.

"Traditionally, happiness followed a U-shape, with youth being a peak period, but it now increases with age instead." Has this claim ever really held water? And according to which tradition exactly? Also define "youth".

"Researchers link this shift to social media, cyberbullying, and reduced social interaction." ah yes, it's those pesky Iphones again! Thankfully it's not, for an example, the actual algorithms themselves in use at said social media, or the reluctance from the profiteers (of the widespread unhappiness of youth) to actually change these algorithms in order to protect the in cases extremely young user base of these, despite constant promises to do so, take Meta and Zuck's talks for an example. But then again, fascists do what fascists do, so straight up lying from these kinds of people shouldn't really be surprising anymore to anyone.

Or could it be that no-one knows how to deal with feeling bad? I, personally, started feeling bad when I was around 15 or 16 years of age, and it didn't really stop until some 3 years ago finally. So roughly about 15 years went by. There are many reasons why I started feeling bad, and kept on feeling bad for so long, but from what I've gathered from these years is that parents in general are left too much on their own devices to give their children the tools with which to deal with strong (negative) emotions, literally what to do when you feel bad. I eventually found help through a certain kind of behavioral therapy, because the extent to which my strong emotions affected and had affected my behavior and actions was basically what kept on fueling my bad feelings and general inability to live (and also large sums and amounts of prescribed antidepressant, anti-psychotic and sedative medications, all of which did fuck-all towards improving the quality of my life by themselves. Only with therapy, which was difficult and expensive to find and acquire access to).

There are parts in this fork of therapy, especially in the topic of emotional regulation skills, that could and should be integrated into the strategy of general upbringing pretty much everywhere. The parents should know how to bring up their kids to have the ability to learn more about these skills (and their importance to life in general) especially coming into teenage, which is a tumultuous time emotionally and behaviorally for everyone I think.

So, a revamping of upbringing seems to be in order, but what's stopping us? Oh yes, what causes every evil in this world: money, or lack thereof.

"[This] may have significant consequences that affect education, workforce participation, and productivity", oh no, not the productivity! WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE SHAREHOLDERS! Never mind the kids, but think of all the fat stacks they are losing due to their wage-slaves not feeling good in a world controlled by capitalism! Whatever shall we do? Well what do we always do? Start a few new wars or something, that should distract them for a while, while simultaneously culling enough people to make it seem like the standard of living has increased. That should buy a few decades or even centuries to make more money.

Fucking hell.

Good news for us that are getting older, I guess?

Well strap in because adulthood sucks too.

Puberty is already a hard time for most people. Add to that that nowadays this is also the time the youth becomes acutely aware of the state of things worldwide or at least state-wide, no wonder they get depressed.

"Yeah, you'll have to work until you die and the planet will probably be in flames by the time you reach middle age with hundreds of millions of climate refugees overrunning what's left of society at that point, but hey - Tiktok!"

Traditionally, happiness followed a U-shape

Example:

• Happy 🙂 mouth makes U shape
• Unhappy ☹️ mouth makes ⋂ shape

Well, living standards are falling, there are significantly more wars again, fascists are on the rise everywhere, social media is full of hate and misinformation, climate change is progressing and not only are there no serious efforts against it, but climate activists are treated like terrorists...all in all: is that really surprising?

if its increasing with age then all the study shows is a rise in delusion.

For people who want data and the paper, it looks like this paper was compiled from a lot of different sources and seems pretty reputable, my only concern is the lower sample size for some of the newer surveys from recent years on just some of the data, but the trend does seem believable considering the older data from the 70s/80s was already showing the trend.

It really seems like it's not as much fun being a kid anymore, imo it's kind of a cop out to blame social media when it's the stuff they learn about the world through social media that makes them depressed. But if kids are getting depressed about our reality then reality has to get better for them to get better.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33490/w33490.pdf

My experience has definitely been a bit of a squiggly line, but I think I'm probably an outlier.

I’m a millennial and my happiness curve has definitely been a mostly linear progression. I guess that means I’m just ahead of the curve? 😅