The global rise of unhappiness and how religion can reverse the trend

(RNS) — Young people are supposed to be the happiest among us. Increasingly, they are not.

Today’s epidemic of youth despair shows a departure from decades of previous research. Historically, youth and adolescents tended to score higher on markers of wellbeing. Middle-age people — who carry the stressors associated with being parents, having a mortgage and caring for aging parents — have always tended to report lower levels of flourishing. Senior adults completed the U-shaped wellbeing curve as they reported higher levels of flourishing. Now data confirms that the left (youthward) side of this U-shaped wellbeing curve has collapsed.

In his landmark book “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt documents clearly that American youth chronically struggle with hopelessness and purposelessness, even as they spend countless hours scrolling through social media sites that exacerbate their struggles.

But the unhappiness problem is more serious than many realize: It has gone global. We now have many published studies showing that young people across the world are struggling in similar ways to American youth. In particular, findings from the Global Flourishing Study (GFS) confirm…