We’re no longer at our unhappiest during middle age

We used to become particularly dissatisfied with mature life, creating a “bump of misfortune” nestled between the most satisfied periods of youth and more advanced age – but this is no longer the case.

This proverbial bump has now disappeared, not because people are happier in their forties, but because young people are less happy than before, explains Alex Bryson to the University College in London.

“We find that stress has increased among most people under the age of 40, and increases much faster in the age group you are going,” he said. “So we see an inclination of distress over time, the youngest are becoming more and more in distress.”

Previous research based on the data of 145 countries suggested that people were the happiest up to 30 years and after 70 years, the misfortune culminating at around 50 years. Similar trends even seem to apply to orangutans and chimpanzees.

But Bryson and his colleagues noticed that the bump of misfortune seemed to have disappeared, on the basis of the data of national mental health surveys in the United States, which involved 10 million adults from 1993 to 2024, and in the United Kingdom, which examined 40,000 households from 2009 to 2023.

To find out if that was the case worldwide, researchers have turned to data from Global Minds, a mental health research project for 2020 in nearly 2 million people in 44 countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. They found that in each nation studied, the bump of misfortune was replaced by a gradually descending line as misfortune decreases with age.

So, are people in the middle of life now happier than them? “Absolutely not,” says Bryson. “If anything, people of average age are somehow intermediate. Things haven’t really changed for them. All changes are in the lower half of the age distribution. ”

The new trend has been the strongest in high-income and English-speaking countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, and the weakest in the fields of Africa with poor Internet access, he said. In Tanzania, for example, where only 32% of people had internet access in 2022, young people without internet access were much happier than those who had. Additional research could help explain these results, explains Bryson.

Reduced happiness in young people could have several explanations, such as increased use of social media or these people particularly affected by the isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as by the difficulty of access to mental health services, explains BRYSON.