Youth Happiness and the Struggle with Mental Health

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, and I am usually here to talk about happiness. This week, I’ve got devastating news to share. I have talked in previous videos about the scary signs and signals that our young people are entering adult life in profound states of poor mental well-being. That runs contrary to the historic research that shows this u-curve in happiness. We start our lives happy, we get progressively into our lowest states of happiness in midlife, and then end our lives happy again, so there’s this U-curve. It’s a well-established fact, although sometimes there’s arguments, but we simply see that that truth of a U-shaped curve for happiness is no longer the truth of our society.

A very recent study by the Center for Disease Control in the United States has profound findings. The rise of suicidal ideation is by is 60% greater in team girls than it was just 10 years ago. The rates of sexual violence, depression, anxiety are through the roof. It’s hard to get our heads around it, and that’s what this video is about.

Okay, I usually like to produce videos that have some cheerful element and say, “Hey, here’s ways we can lean into positive psychology to make our own lives better.” But this week’s video runs a little contrary to that. It is my effort to give a stark warning about the reality of the world we live in. We have seen for decades now, ever since we’ve kind of started measuring levels of happiness, that our society as a whole is doing less well. We’re becoming a more depressed, more anxious society. I’ve speculated as to reasons why that might be true. I think generally it’s the loss of community. As we’ve gone away from villages and farms and small communities where everybody knew everybody to big cities and urban living, we’ve become more and more isolated. That’s my simplistic explanation.

The U-curve trend has held and the evidence, even though there’s arguments sometimes in the field, is really quite convincing. We generally, historically all around the world, have our heights of happiness as we enter our adult lives and then we get decreasingly happy as we get into midlife. Mortgages, kids, routines, and rote performance of the same things over and over again, people get into that classic midlife crisis. Then fortunately, towards the end of our lives in our 50s, 60s and 70s, we go happier and happier, making this very well-proven U-shaped curve. For those of you who are kind of super into this stuff, I’ll put a link to the study in the description below that provides overwhelming evidence that the U-shaped curve is, in fact, the true relationship between people’s age and their own levels of personal happiness.

But I am fearful that for the first time ever in the history of the world, certainly in the history of our measuring this stuff, we are seeing kids in crisis, profound crisis. In this new study, I’ll put a link to that as well in the description, it’s showing young women in particular, teen girls, in just devastatingly poor condition as they enter their young adult lives. This may fundamentally change something that has probably been true for the history of the world, that this U-shaped curve of happiness existed. Now we are starting people in their young adulthood in profound states of poor well-being. What are the implications of that as these young women age and go into what has historically been tougher times into their midlife times? If we’re already starting really poor, what are the implications for our society, for parenting, for professionalism and competence and coping at work, and ultimately, in the most extreme cases, for suicide, substance abuse, anxiety, depression, and all those terrible things?

I think there’s only a few things I know for sure. That sense of isolation has been changing decade by decade by decade, getting worse and worse and worse, and we have this epidemic of loneliness that so many people talk about and is again well supported by the data. I think this additional burden, and there’s some evidence obviously and I’m speculating a little, but I think it’ll make common sense to you. The thing that’s hurting young women more than anything else is social media. It is the fact that they are doing that doom scrolling, comparing their lives to other people’s picture-perfect, filtered views of their wonderful lives. If we don’t measure up in terms of our beauty, our fitness, our brains or the excitement of our lives, the wonderful people and places we go to and all that kind of stuff, then we feel bad about ourselves and we’re busy always trying to measure up in a way that we’ve never had that kind of social comparison before.

If I was in a high school with 30 other kids in my graduating class, I may not measure up at the top, but I’m probably feeling like I’ve got some real sense of how I compare in the world. Whereas now, when we have these thought leaders and social media stars where they are the one in the point 0.0001 percentage of the population that we’re all now looking at as models for how we should be or want to be, the standard is just completely unreasonable. Moreover, and I don’t understand why this is true either, sexual violence is rising against young women in high school ages too. In a world where I think we are growing up with more progressive thoughts and more enlightenment, there’s something fundamentally wrong there.

I have nothing more to share except, if you’re a parent or if you’ve got teenage kids in your life in some fashion, or if you simply care about where our society is going, we fundamentally need to do something about the way we’re dealing with the environments that children grow up in. Mostly, I have to say, it’s a matter of getting fewer social media inputs into these kids’ lives and, frankly, it’s high time that governments regulate the content that’s being shown to kids because we know fundamentally it’s profoundly hurting them. So that’s it for this week, cheery as it is. If you like this kind of content, click the like button, share it with friends and family. We need to do something about this stuff. Thanks for watching, bye for now