According to the General Social Survey, here's the trend in people reporting that they aren't very happy:
I struggle to reconcile this with reports that young people are depressed, stressed out, and generally kind of miserable. From 1970 through 2018, there was very little change in young adults reporting that they aren't happy. It bounces around in the range of 10-15% the entire time. And even if you assume that the effect of the pandemic is permanent (which is unlikely), this has increased by only 5% since then.
This doesn't mean that reports of mental distress among young adults are wrong. It just means there's a disconnect of some kind. In the GSS survey, their level of unhappiness is about the same as everyone else and it hasn't changed much over 50 years aside from the COVID years. I would very much like for someone to figure out what's going on here.
"Aside from the COVID years" is doing a lot of work here. I have a foster child that was in high school that year, and the amount of disruption should not be underestimated. Possibly even more disruptive than wartime was for children - in wartime, at least they went to classes and saw friends and other humans. I've heard from multiple teacher friends that many of their kids post-shutdown are much less capable socially, and act out in odd ways.
I suspect the main disconnect is the degree and intensity of the cases - the broad numbers of cases are not hugely different.
You're starting to get really lazy with your chart labels. Is everything okay?
Of course, put another way, youth unhappiness is up 50-100%
I honestly think it is all doom -- esp. climate change and AI. Esp climate change "we're all going to die." But even serial liar David Wallace-Wells rightly notes:
Recently I came across perhaps the most mind-bending chart about the pandemic I’d seen over three-plus years. Originally published two years ago in The British Medical Journal, it shows how Covid affected age-standardized mortality in England and Wales.
At the onset of the pandemic in 2020, there was a dramatic spike in age-standardized mortality. For men, the increase was 14.6 percent, according to the Office for National Statistics; for women, 11.9 percent...
That jump ... only brought age-standardized mortality to the level it had been in the year 2008, meaning that, correcting for age, the English and the Welsh were no more likely to die in 2020, in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime global health crisis, than they were 12 years before, in what did not seem like a particularly deadly year at the time....
The mortality setbacks of 2020 looked smaller than the apparent gains of the previous 20 years — and not just in England and Wales. Across much of Western Europe and North America, even the horrible pandemic peaks only brought age-standardized death rates as high as they were in normal-seeming years around the turn of the millennium.
I'm sorry, David Wallace-Wells is a serial liar how, exactly?
Mixing and matching different questions about various aspects of mental health or a persons general feeling is not going to give you a clear, simple one word conclusion.
"I would very much like for someone to figure out what's going on here."
Reconciliation is easy. We are told, repeatedly, every day that we are doomed and everything is going to hell in a hand basket. Young people, always the most impressionable, will repeat what they are told given one set of prompts, those that are salient to "what do you think you are supposed to say";
but their lives are, like most of our lives, pretty good and, given a different set of prompts for which "what do you think you are supposed to say" is not salient, they will answer as to how they actually feel, not as to what society says they are supposed to feel.
But, like I have said before, for the first time in a long time, youth culture is trending right, not left; and many in the media and the academy are freaking out about this. Insisting that they are all border-line suicidal is one way (not a very smart way, but good ideas are lacking...) to pretend that this doesn't mean what it very clearly means. Claims as to opiates of the masses have a long (inglorious) history; so hell, why not focus now on the deadliness of the opiate rather than the delusional aspect?