What caught my eye this week.
How do you feel today? Happy? Sad? Despairing? Joyous?
Can’t believe there’s still a week to go until Euro 2024 kicks off to relieve the tedium of the same old, same old, soggy British spring?
Or dreading football on the telly 24/7?
Hmm… can I ask how old you are?
Age-appropriate emotions
For as long as I can remember, posts about the happiness ‘smile curve’ have been a staple of personal finance blogs.
Perhaps it was because so many bloggers were in or approaching middle-age.
The smile curve theory, you see, came from research showing a person’s lifetime happiness followed a U-shaped curve.
You were happier when you were young and carefree. And you were happier again when you were old and grateful and didn’t give so many tosses anymore.
But in the middle? Loaded down by mortgage repayments, ungrateful children, and job stress?
Not so much.
No doubt the theory resonated in FIRE circles because it gave an extra reason for – and impetus to exit – the heads-down push through the suck to achieve financial freedom.
But – alas – it seems the smile curve has turned lop-sided.
Like this video about unhappiness
In The Global Loss of the U-Shaped Curve of Happiness, David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson tell us new research has…
…shown something astonishing and of global importance: the general contour of happiness across the age-span has changed around the world.
Young adults are now the least happy people, and this broad multinational change began sometime in the mid-2010s, right as Gen Z was entering this age-group.
I’ve linked to other takes on this trend before. It does seem to be well-established.
Of course this being 2024, every faction has a different theory as to why young people (especially young women) are so much more despairing:
- Progressives blame structural inequalities and a greater awareness of dangerous prejudices such as racism and misogyny.
- Traditionalists see an erosion of family values that’s left young people adrift with nothing to aim for but satisfying their own hedonistic ends.
- Environmentalists point out the climate – and our future – is going to hell in a hand basket. Despair is rational.
- Techno-sceptics warn that smartphones daily pipe a globe’s worth of desire and misery into eyeballs only meant for the surrounding 5km of savannah.
- Older people think identity politics has given everyone a grudge.
- Financially-minded Monevator readers might blame sky-high house prices and rents, or how taxes scythe away young people’s incomes even as more bungs go to pensioners.
There is something in all of it. But I do think smartphones should take most of the blame for the specific curve shift.
Some version of everything else was going on well before 2017, after all.
Thanks to smartphones and social media though, young people do appear to be much more aware of both the wider cruelties and injustices in the world, and also the roadblocks standing in their own way.
But of course they learn about most of it through polarised social media and 30-second videos. There’s little room for nuance.
To generalise: I’d say they’re more aware, but less informed.
Student grant philosophising
When I was in my early 20s, talking to the average person at a party about the sort of issues that everyone now has a gripe about usually earned you funny looks.
I know this because I read very widely for a science student – everything from business profiles to Marx to AdBusters magazine – and I actually was talking to people about the troubles of the world at parties.
And it usually went down about as well as you’d expect.
Obviously I like to think I was bit more intellectually sophisticated than the average 90’s kid pining for The Beach without wondering what it meant for the locals or the ecology.
But I suppose you could just see a posturing Rick from the Young Ones.
The point is though, it took some research to even know about much of the stuff in my all-faction complaint list above. You didn’t get a five-second hit when sitting on the loo.
Most people spent little time thinking about any of it, unless they happened to catch a late night documentary on the BBC.
Whereas today reminders are omnipresent.
And at the clear risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly old man, while I’m heartened young people now appreciate the world is a pretty screwed-up place, I wish they’d try harder to understand why.
Regular debates I’m having with a younger friend about the horror show in the Middle East come to mind. But it’s true of many things.
Younger people genuinely do seem to care more than most of my generation did at that age. And they at least say more of the right things about the world beyond their own desires.
But ask them what should be done about any of the issues and there’s often little substance there.
Walking back to happiness
At least 30 years ago the typical person was unhypocritical in not giving two hoots about, say, the plight of indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin.
There was a pure-hearted obliviousness to it.
Whereas now people see a TikTok video, they’re angry, but they seem to not explore what’s even feasible as a remedy – beyond waving their hands at capitalism, men, or wokery, depending on how they roll.
I suspect this blend of being constantly provoked but at the same time feeling it’s well beyond anyone’s control is even worse than when I was young and engaged myself.
And that this is what has pulled down the lefthand of the smile curve.
At least I got happier with time. I guess they will too. Perhaps you get immune to gloom? Or maybe you just get complacent.
Then again maybe it really is all because young people can’t see how they’ll ever afford a house – and yet they can’t follow the old escape route into sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll either because online dating is awful, they know the drugs don’t work, and today’s music is written by robots.
Gosh I feel old. But at least I’m happier than I was!
Apologies to anyone reading who is under-30. Despite my gripes above, you’re actually my second-favourite generation. (After my own Gen X, of course. Slackers forever.)
Please share your perspective below on the fashion for youthful angst. That way we can all learn together.
Have a great weekend!
