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youth is no longer one of the happiest times

Which has always had the strong whiff of bullshit marketing imposed by patronizing adults, trying to force a square peg into the round hole.

Like the guy said at the end of the '93 comedy film Dazed & Confused - "If I ever start referring to these as the happiest days of my life, remind me to kill myself", and he was the cool, open-minded star athlete, the one best equipped to have a good time in his youth.

This is why we need to continue to relax our child labor laws. The youth will be happiest when they can have a steady job in the mines, again.

(This is sarcasm.)

Those of us raised by narcissists didn't have a "curve". It's been a flat line my entire life. /traumaDump

The biggest lie I was ever told was "these are the best years of your life" growing up, and frankly that made me want to end it all. Things have ONLY been uphill since the end of high school.

Kids and teenagers especially are all awful creatures. School showed me that, then six years in the pet industry watching how they behave around animals solidified it for me.

This is so fucking disgusting to me, that this has been done to us, that youth and joy have been corrupted and siphoned off and manipulated and taken from us.

Traditionally, happiness followed a U-shape

Example:

• Happy 🙂 mouth makes U shape
• Unhappy ☹️ mouth makes ⋂ shape

For what reason could a child in 2025 be upset?

Maybe it's the dying world? The dying society? Our dying economy? Our dying species?

We are seriously fucking up by not executing the rich before they guarentee the collapse of our support systems, and the extinction of our species and all large animal life on earth.

Well strap in because adulthood sucks too.

if its increasing with age then all the study shows is a rise in delusion.

Well, living standards are falling, there are significantly more wars again, fascists are on the rise everywhere, social media is full of hate and misinformation, climate change is progressing and not only are there no serious efforts against it, but climate activists are treated like terrorists...all in all: is that really surprising?

I’m a millennial and my happiness curve has definitely been a mostly linear progression. I guess that means I’m just ahead of the curve? 😅

My experience has definitely been a bit of a squiggly line, but I think I'm probably an outlier.

For people who want data and the paper, it looks like this paper was compiled from a lot of different sources and seems pretty reputable, my only concern is the lower sample size for some of the newer surveys from recent years on just some of the data, but the trend does seem believable considering the older data from the 70s/80s was already showing the trend.

It really seems like it's not as much fun being a kid anymore, imo it's kind of a cop out to blame social media when it's the stuff they learn about the world through social media that makes them depressed. But if kids are getting depressed about our reality then reality has to get better for them to get better.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33490/w33490.pdf

Good news for us that are getting older, I guess?