The midlife crisis is the new midlife crisis: young people's problems are crushing the unhappiness curve.

The unhappiness curve is disappearing, but this isn't good news. Until now, life satisfaction was shaped like a smile. It started high in youth, sank in middle age, in what in Spain has come to be known as the midlife crisis , and then rebounded. Unhappiness, on the other hand, was shaped like a hump or an inverted smile :-( . But a comprehensive study published this Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS One shows how this curve has eroded to the point of almost disappearing. It's not that the midlife crisis has subsided; rather, we've begun to see something we could define as a midlife crisis. Unhappiness now starts high, at very early ages, and tends to decline throughout life.

The study was conducted with responses from more than 10 million adults in the United States (responded between 1993 and 2024), with a longitudinal analysis involving 40,000 households in the United Kingdom, and with two million questionnaires from the Global Minds survey, conducted in 44 countries (including Spain). Lots of data, lots of countries, but one clear conclusion. "The truth is, we were surprised that the results were so global," acknowledges David G. Blanchflower , an economist at the University of London and lead author of the study.

The authors didn't ask about the reasons, but they point to the consequences of the pandemic, the housing crisis, and, above all, the widespread use of smartphones. This would explain the uniformity of the data in very diverse contexts. "What a boy from Germany and another from New York have in common, for example, is access to the internet and smartphones," explains Blanchflower. "In developing countries, however, we saw that those without internet access didn't show such poor mental health."

The author doesn't believe this is due so much to the effect of mobile phones themselves , but rather to the way they deplete free time, squeezing it away until it disappears . "Mobile phones have displaced beneficial activities. Children no longer play, they no longer talk... spending too much time on the internet distances people from useful activities."

This could explain another of the study's notable findings. Young women report significantly higher levels of distress than young men in all the countries analyzed. This is a constant in all studies analyzing the impact of the internet and social media on perceived well-being. The most recent example was offered by the HBSC (Health Behavior in School-aged Children) study , published by the Spanish Ministry of Health. It indicated that this problem affects girls twice as often (with a prevalence of 51.2%) as boys (25.2%).

This study is important because of the vast amount of data on which it is based. And because it puts the discomfort of younger generations into a broader context, comparing it with the self-perceived satisfaction of their elders. Its conclusions are devastating, but not surprising. Something began to go wrong starting in 2010, and there is a wealth of scientific literature that has fully documented this. Rates of depression and anxiety among adolescents skyrocketed by 50% . Suicide rates increased by 32% . Members of Generation Z—those born after 1996—began to suffer from anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders, reaching levels higher than any other generation in history.

The midlife crisis has pulverized the unhappiness curve. But we must keep in mind that this is a snapshot that will have to be updated. Generation Z youth, with more mental health problems than their elders, will reach their 40s and 50s. And there's no guarantee that they won't then face the same life-threatening ravages that have affected previous generations. Meanwhile, new generations will be added to the curve, and nothing indicates that they will become less dependent on their phones. In other words, the happiness curve has only disappeared for the moment. It's expected to happen again in a few years, only more extreme. Hitting rock bottom will mean going even further down.

“I don't know how the situation will evolve,” Blanchflower acknowledges. “Every year a new cohort of 12-year-olds joins, and the rest age a year, but nothing changes. The group born since 2000 seems to have poor mental health. I hope we can stop this.” It doesn't seem easy, the author explains. Hospitalizations among young people due to depression continue to rise, as do suicides and antidepressant use. This study is based on self-perceived mental health, but it is underscored by all these data, which have increased in recent years among younger generations. According to the 2022 National Report on Healthcare Quality and Disparities, in the United States, between 2016 and 2019, the rate of emergency department visits with a primary diagnosis related to mental health increased among the 0-17 age group, from 784.1 per 100,000 population to 869.3 per 100,000 population.

The midlife crisis began to be described in 2008. Since then, it has been documented in more than 600 studies in different countries. The increase in worry, stress, and depression with age has been widely documented in sociology over the past 20 years. Blanchflower himself studied the phenomenon in earlier studies. “In a whole series of articles, I argued that the U-shape was an important finding, until it wasn't! Those findings were correct, but something has changed; it doesn't seem to be written in the genes,” he notes.

Maite Garaigordobil Landazabal, professor of Psychological Assessment and Diagnosis at the University of the Basque Country, praises the current study for its large database. Speaking to the scientific website SMC, she notes that "it is relevant because it challenges a well-established empirical finding: the existence of a U-shaped curve of well-being and a hump of discomfort throughout life." Garaigordobil considers the results "very novel" and that they "break with one of the most cited regularities in the social sciences." On the same website, Eduard Vieta, professor of Psychiatry at the University of Barcelona, ​​emphasizes the quality of the data and agrees with the diagnosis. But he adds another possible cause. "I think the contrast between expectations and reality is missing. The younger generations in most of the countries included in the study have received a very overprotective upbringing and have developed a low tolerance for frustration. I think this aspect is also relevant to explaining their emotional distress," he adds.

The article concludes that this global trend demands urgent attention from governments, researchers, and civil society to reverse the decline in youth well-being. When asked about any concrete ideas or measures, Blanchflower suggests restricting phone access as one possibility. But above all, offering alternatives. Migrating social life again, but in reverse, from the screen to the street. Encourage play, social encounters, and time outdoors. “Encourage children to behave like children,” she adds.