Adulthood, One Year In

When I moved to Washington, D.C., last year, my car had just enough room for my books, my clothes, and my mom, as we road-tripped to the city from Michigan. Senior year at Hillsdale College came and went so quickly that it wasn’t until I said goodbye to my best friend on our front porch that it sank in: We were adults. One year in, and there have been too many “adult” moments to list: the time my appendix ruptured at the White House; the time a Jewish friend and I read the news together, in horror, in the early hours of October 7; the time I drove into a curb and it took six of my friends in evening wear to change a flat tire; the time a softball broke my cheekbone at a recreational practice. And all this while my family was thousands of miles away in California. There were friends who got married and had babies and friends who drifted. There were times I needed a hug and didn’t know anyone well enough to ask for one. It was a year of tremendous happiness.

A surprising finding from a study published earlier this year is that youth no longer implies happiness. Until recently, it’s been assumed that happiness over a lifetime tends to follow a U shape: People have been generally happier in youth or old age, with a midlife slump in between. Dartmouth’s David Blanchflower, one of the leading minds behind this U-shaped happiness curve and a co-author of the recent National Bureau of Economic Research study, told Scientific American that the pattern was relatively stable “until it wasn’t.” Data collected from 2009 to 2022 suggest that the U-curve has morphed into “a graph line that reveals a consistent decrease in unhappiness with age.” What’s particularly troubling is that, as the study’s authors note, “this pattern is driven by an increase in unhappiness among young people both in absolute terms and relative to older people.” Unhappiness among young people is a global phenomenon that began, said Blanchflower, around 2014 — the same time many social scientists, such as Jean Twenge, have identified as the period in which smartphones and the rise of social media began to negatively affect children’s mental and emotional well-being. Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation of the “great rewiring” that happened to children between 2012 and 2019: “It’s not just about smartphones and social media; it’s about a historic and unprecedented transformation of human childhood.”

About the Author

Haley Strack

Haley Strack is a former staff writer at National Review.

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When I moved to Washington, D.C., last year, my car had just enough room for my books, my clothes, and my mom, as we road-tripped to the city from Michigan. Senior year at Hillsdale College came and went so quickly that it wasn’t until I said goodbye to my best friend on our front porch that it sank in: We were adults. One year in, and there have been too many “adult” moments to list: the time my appendix ruptured at the White House; the time a Jewish friend and I read the news together, in horror, in the early hours of October 7; the time I drove into a curb and it took six of my friends in evening wear to change a flat tire; the time a softball broke my cheekbone at a recreational practice. And all this while my family was thousands of miles away in California. There were friends who got married and had babies and friends who drifted. There were times I needed a hug and didn’t know anyone well enough to ask for one. It was a year of tremendous happiness.

A surprising finding from a study published earlier this year is that youth no longer implies happiness. Until recently, it’s been assumed that happiness over a lifetime tends to follow a U shape: People have been generally happier in youth or old age, with a midlife slump in between. Dartmouth’s David Blanchflower, one of the leading minds behind this U-shaped happiness curve and a co-author of the recent National Bureau of Economic Research study, told Scientific American that the pattern was relatively stable “until it wasn’t.” Data collected from 2009 to 2022 suggest that the U-curve has morphed into “a graph line that reveals a consistent decrease in unhappiness with age.” What’s particularly troubling is that, as the study’s authors note, “this pattern is driven by an increase in unhappiness among young people both in absolute terms and relative to older people.” Unhappiness among young people is a global phenomenon that began, said Blanchflower, around 2014 — the same time many social scientists, such as Jean Twenge, have identified as the period in which smartphones and the rise of social media began to negatively affect children’s mental and emotional well-being. Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation of the “great rewiring” that happened to children between 2012 and 2019: “It’s not just about smartphones and social media; it’s about a historic and unprecedented transformation of human childhood.”