Global data shows young adults are struggling more than ever

What it takes to flourish

The goal of the study is to provide a more well-rounded understanding of well-being. It’s a subjective concept, but Case feels the largest study of its kind is up to the task.

“We always want to be very clear that this is just a map, not the terrain,” he said. “An actual flourishing life is incredibly complicated, and it’s probably a little different for every person. We think this is a good first approximation, at least, of what a flourishing life consists of.”

The Global Flourishing Study features around 200,000 people — including 27,007 young adults — across 22 diverse countries. To determine how people live their best lives, the study developed survey questions concerning a variety of metrics, including happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue and close social relationships.

“We think it’s important to cast a really wide net and not just focus on economic issues, on health or on happiness,” Case explained.

Young adults aren’t doing so great these days

As the associate director of research at Harvard’s Human Flourishing program, Case serves as a member of the program’s analyst team and agreed to breakdown some of the study’s biggest findings about young adults.

“What we’re seeing in the Global Flourishing Study, and also in other data from the U.S. and Western Europe over the last five years, [is] there’s been an increasing trend of declining well-being in many aspects of young people’s lives,” he said.

“Most of the focus, understandably, has gone to the mental health crisis among adolescents and young adults. What we are seeing is that the struggles are really happening across a much wider front than just mental health.”

Conventional wisdom among well-being researchers for the last couple decades, Case explained, held that happiness over a person’s lifetime could be described as a U-shaped curve. Happiness was highest among young adults and older adults, but lowest in middle age. From mortgages to aging parents, middle age was seen as a time of new, difficult challenges. Young adult and older adult life was less burdensome.

The left hand side of that curve, the part that represents young adult life, is now flattening — creating more of a J-shaped curve. It’s bad news for people in their 20s, possible 30s and 40s.

For some flourishing metrics, Case said study participants’ curves remained flat until age 50. That’s up to 32 years of struggle with flourishing for a happy, healthy life.

Take health scores, for instance. Study participants were asked to rate their own health, and U.S. young adults rated themselves lower than any other age group. Eighty-year-old participants actually rated themselves the highest in the country.

“It’s not necessarily an index of absolute physical health,” Case said. “The 18 to 24-year-olds in the United States objectively are still healthier than the 80-year-olds. To our minds, it’s a really striking commentary on how young people perceive themselves today. That they just don’t think of themselves as healthy in the way that older people do.”

Depression and other chronic illnesses

According to 2019 data, over half U.S. adults 18 to 34 had at least one chronic medical condition. Nearly a quarter of adults within that age range had more than one condition. The most common conditions were obesity (25.5% of adults), depression (21.3% of adults) and high blood pressure (10.7% of adults).

“Young people today in many countries — not all, but most of the countries in the Global Flourishing study — seem decidedly less, not just optimistic, but just seem much less sanguine about their lives.”

Another major self-reported issue among young adults was depression. When surveyed, 83% of U.S. young adults said they experienced feelings of depression within the last two weeks. Only 33% of 80-year-old participants said the same.

According to a 2022 study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, U.S. young adults report issues with anxiety and depression twice as often as teens. Over half young adults in the study reported both feeling a lack of “meaning or purpose” and negative impacts to their mental health from financial worries. Roughly 45% said their mental health was deteriorating because of a general “sense that things are falling apart.” About 44% felt a sense of not mattering to others, while 34% reported feeling lonely.

While this study has been years in the making, researchers are not stopping yet. Utilizing Gallup for data collection, Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program is collaborating with Baylor University to survey those same 200,000 people each year for five years.