Red, white and feeling blue.
Turns out that Gen Zers aren’t universally unhappy — they’re just sullen in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Outside those four countries, people under 25 reported increasing feelings of happiness over the last decade, according to the 14th edition of the World Happiness Report, released Wednesday.
Authors of the annual report aren’t sure why there’s a happiness gap, but they believe it might have to do with social media use. It seems that these feeds are not really nourishing young minds, bodies or souls.
“We still don’t know why the youth happiness drop has been so much larger in those countries than elsewhere,” report founding editor John F. Helliwell, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of British Columbia, told The Post about the US and the three other cheerless countries.
“It is not because social media use is much higher there than elsewhere, as it is almost universal everywhere among Gen Z,” he added. “Some of the increase may reflect differences in how social
media are used in those countries, all of which are in the English-speaking orbit.”
The report — which is based on Gallup World Poll data and other sources — linked heavy social media use to lower well-being, but that association is very dependent on the user, the platforms they visited, the scope of their usage and their duration of usage.
US teens spend an average of 4.8 hours a day scrolling through social media, according to Gallup data from 2023.
Young people who use social media for less than an hour a day had the highest levels of well-being, the report found — even more than social media abstainers.
That may be because social media has been shown to foster social connections and a sense of belonging even as it fuels intense social comparison, anxiety and depression.
Gen Zers aren’t the only morose Americans. The World Happiness Report ranks over 140 nations based on a three-year average of quality of life assessments.
The report’s authors also consider GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, strength of friendships, a sense of freedom, generosity and perceptions of corruption.
Finland — home of free education and affordable health care — leads the world in happiness for a ninth consecutive year, with an average score of 7.8 out of 10.
You might be surprised to learn that people are more joyful in Israel (No. 8), Kosovo (No. 16), Slovenia (No. 18), United Arab Emirates (No. 21) and Saudi Arabia (No. 22) than in the US (No. 23).
The US ranked 24th in 2024, 23rd in 2023, 15th in 2022, 16th in 2021 and 20th in 2020.
“When job and housing prospects look dim, and polarization is growing, these are real reasons for changes in feelings,” Helliwell said.
“Overall rankings are driven down by the youth unhappiness, but are not the whole story, since there are some echoes for those in older age groups,” he continued. “But for the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the drops are mainly among the young.”
