For decades, the midlife crisis seemed almost carved into adulthood. The story was simple enough: people were expected to feel their lowest somewhere around middle age, then recover as they grew older.
A new study now challenges that stereotype. The big change is not that middle-aged people have suddenly become much happier- it is that young adults are reporting far more distress than before, shifting the peak of unhappiness toward the start of adult life.
The old curve has broken
The old pattern was known as the U-shaped happiness curve. In plain English, it meant happiness tended to be high in youth, fall through midlife, and rise again later. Its darker twin was the “unhappiness hump,” where worry, stress, and depression peaked near middle age.
That pattern had been unusually sturdy. According to the new paper, it had been replicated more than 600 times across countries and time. But the latest data show a different picture, with unhappiness now declining with age instead of rising into midlife and then falling.
Young adults now stand out
The study was written by David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, Alex Bryson of University College London, and Xiaowei Xu of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It used data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Global Minds project, covering 44 countries in recent years.
“We now see a peak of unhappiness among the young, which then declines with age,” Bryson wrote in a UCL summary of the research. That is a striking reversal. Not so long ago, youth was usually treated as one of life’s lighter stages.
What despair means
In the U.S. part of the study, researchers used public data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. That survey collects more than 400,000 adult interviews each year. “Despair” meant a person reported that they experienced consistently challenging mental health over the preceding 30 days.
The numbers are hard to ignore. Among young men in the United States, despair rose from 2.5 percent in 1993 to 6.6 percent in 2024. Among young women, it climbed from 3.2 percent to 9.3 percent over the same period.
This rise doesn’t only affect Americans
The United Kingdom showed a similar warning sign. Among men younger than 25, despair more than doubled between 2009 and 2021, rising from 2.3 percent to 6.4 percent. Among young women, it rose from 4.4 percent to 12.7 percent, with much of the increase coming after 2016.
In terms of the wider world, we also see the same pattern. In the Global Minds sample from 2020 through 2025, 48 percent of people younger than 25 were classified as clinically at risk based on their scores. That does not mean every young person has a medical diagnosis, but it does suggest it’s becoming ever increasingly common.
A study with limits
This research is about self-reported mental health. In other words, it tracks what people say about how they feel, not what a doctor has diagnosed in a clinic. That distinction matters.
Eduard Vieta of the University of Barcelona, commenting through Science Media Centre Spain, said the paper has a sound scientific basis, but he also noted that it measures perceived mental health and social well-being.
That caution does not erase the finding, though it limits how conclusive the results can be.
Phones, jobs, and pressure
So what changed? The authors do not claim one simple cause. They say the decline began before COVID, though the pandemic may have made existing trends worse, especially for younger people.
Smartphones and social media are one possible factor. The paper also points to tougher housing and labor market conditions, recession scars for people entering work at a bad time, overstretched mental health services, and the constant comparison machine that many young people carry in their pockets.
Anyone who has watched a late-night phone scroll turn into anxiety knows how ordinary that can feel.
Another study agrees
A separate National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and Blanchflower reached a similar conclusion.
It reviewed 11 studies across six English-speaking countries, including the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
That paper found that happiness and life satisfaction have tended to rise with age since 2020 in those countries. In practical terms, the old U-shape has been replaced by a youth well-being crisis. The clock, in other words, is starting much earlier than the old midlife-crisis story suggested.
What this changes
The findings do not mean middle-aged adults no longer struggle. They also do not mean every young person is unhappy. But they do suggest that public attention may need to shift toward earlier support, before distress hardens into a long-term problem.
Schools, families, employers, and health systems may all have a role here. Better access to mental health care, healthier online spaces, less precarious first-jobs, and more realistic paths into adult life could matter more than slogans about resilience.
Small fixes will not solve everything. But ignoring the new curve will not help either.
The main study has been published in PLOS One.
