Young people aren't as happy as they used to be [Global Flourishing Study]
69 comments
·April 30, 2025reedf1
chneu
The best way to look at it that I've found:
Previous generations bought cheap crap that came with a debt. That $2 burger actually cost $20 but that $18 was hidden. All the cheap stuff is the same way. When we buy cheap things it comes with a debt.
When we have to spend $10billion rebuilding after a natural disaster? That's that debt coming due.
Beef is by far the worst at this.
PartiallyTyped
I currently rent with roommates at 28 and commute 40 minutes, it does feel a bit embarrassing but I get to save a bit.
But that is not enough to build any meaningful wealth, 12k over a year is peanuts, it takes over a decade to save 100k good luck buying a house…
I am genuinely baffled as to how I could potentially escape this…
My only exit is over employment or launching some successful business.
swatcoder
> I am genuinely baffled as to how I could potentially escape this…
> My only exit is over employment or launching some successful business.
This reads like you've already reached the peak of your career at 28. Do you really feel that way?
That seems pretty unusual for a skilled worker, like you'd seem to be if you're able to bank 12k in savings per year already, and as most commenters on HN are.
More usually, you'd expect to be earning much more in 10 years than you do today and perhaps even a fair amount more 10 yeads later depending on what you're capabilities and opportunities turn out to be.
Do you not feel like that's in the cards for you? Why?
PartiallyTyped
I work as a senior engineer in Germany, I make more than most people, but I find it frustrating that a new grad could make more than I do by virtue of living in the states for lower quality work.
My expenses are about 40% of my net income and yet owning a house or apartment in a city like Munich or Dublin and close to jobs looks infeasible unless I am married.
That of course excludes the fact that I don’t expect to live to see my 50s because of potential health concerns.
And of course, should I spend my 20s and 30s working for seemingly nothing?
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DragonStrength
Even if you thread the needle and pull it off (2 high-paying jobs in a household in time for kids), you'll find the infrastructure and community around those well-paying jobs aren't designed for kids and most others didn't thread the needle. It certainly feels like picking between where having kids is within reach versus where the "well-paying" jobs are.
rufus_foreman
>> it takes over a decade to save 100k good luck buying a house
First time home buyers (meaning those who haven't owned a home in the last three years) can get a loan with a down payment of 3%. 12k would be the down payment for a $400,000 house. The average home price in the US is around $350,000.
There are even better deals available for some people, military veterans for example.
hnthrow90348765
My guess is you will see more people try to move into the military/police for these benefits and pensions once they do the math.
The military/police also suffers different image problems than corporate jobs, but advancement and benefits is not one of them. (I am thinking military -> cleared jobs, not within the military)
lp0_on_fire
These deals are a joke and unattainable to the vast majority of people in the post-covid economy.
paying $12k down on a $400k house with a fixed 6.48% rate means your monthly payment is almost $3k per month, and you'll pay more than the house is worth in interest alone. Not to mention if you only have $12k to put down you're _probably_ not in a position to pay $3k a month.
PartiallyTyped
In Dublin — where I lived and rent is 2k unless you live 50 minutes away or manage to find roommates, your mortgage is 3x your salary, so at 130k I made at the time, about 400k, and I’d need 20% down payment…
Good luck buying your own house/apartment without being married. It isn’t happening.
deadbabe
The escape is to go to parts of the country where home ownership is insanely cheap due to low demand, but people don’t want to do it. Instead they bury their head in the sand and hope their hip urban centers suddenly become affordable.
amanaplanacanal
Can they find a good paying job there in their chosen profession? Are there social opportunities for finding mates with matching interests? What are the art and music scenes like? There are a lot more things people think about than cheap housing.
Saline9515
There is a reason for the low demand, usually lack of economic activity and infrastructure. It may work if you're a senior IT freelancer, for other trades... less so.
ch4s3
> where home ownership is insanely cheap due to low demand, but people don’t want to do it.
No one does it because there are no jobs in those places. We're failing as a society to build sufficient housing in areas of economic opportunity. In some areas we're moving backwards, Manhattan housed 300K more people in 1950 than it does today.
Not every job can be remote and most types of work benefit from agglomeration effects. Pretending that we can will people to live middle Pennsylvania by creating jobs somehow is foolish when we could simply build housing where the jobs already are.
aquova
I'm not sure living in a shack in the desert will help with the 40 minute commute
chneu
Ah yes. Move somewhere where there aren't any jobs.
Gotcha.
sQL_inject
Save this comment for the future: comparison is the thief of joy, and in our connected world, comparison is inescapable.
Young people are berated with constant comparison, whether it be beauty standards, financial success (across generations), or romance.
One day we'll study this period and affirm that globalization, hyper addictive media and pornography come with dark sides.
xeromal
It really does seem as simple as that. I grew up dirt poor in rural appalachia but we were all poor so I didn't care. Really had a good life and it helped shaped my perspective on what matters even though I make good money now.
null
cayleyh
This is related to the evaporation of "free time", socializing irl, and hobbies that I've observed vs. my pre-cellphone/pre-internet youth & young adulthood. Not having social media, work emails & slack, and all the group chats enforced periods of quietness, boredom, and being alone. You went out and socialized and did things in public more often just because you were bored and you couldn't just doomscroll and share memes with the group chat. The overall increase in baseline cognitive social load that is entirely digital and interruptive (notifications!!!) instead of planned irl activities just seems to add to general stress levels and decrease baseline mental wellness.
jajko
Bingo, nr 1 reason why older generations now don't grok younger these days. There were always similar scenarios, lets be honest this ain't unique situation generally, despite many trying to claim otherwise, certainly for me and my peers say 25 years ago situation looked almost exactly the same, we just didn't expect to have a great life immediately but work it off gradually.
Heck, my first net salary after university (proper CS title) working 100% as Java software dev was what, cca 350-400$ a month? I could afford almost nothing and that was fine and expected. I don't think I need to calculate how many tens of times my salary went up till this day while still doing Java dev. Yet young folks who start are immediately pissed off they only get very high and not ridiculous amounts right out of school, complaining they can't buy some central housing. Buy?!? As said huge disconnect across generations.
thomassmith65
Globalization was fantastic actually. America is only a few weeks away now from discovering how wrongheaded complaints about it were.
The actual problem is inequality, but inequality in right/libertarian thought is supposed to be good. So they * reached for a more comfortable explanation involving 'the other': globalists!
* 'they' is a discourse smell, so I will cite some examples: Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Viktor Orban, etc.
It has been annoying, for almost two decades, to witness the success of anti-globalization propaganda.
Economic inequality surely is contributing to depression in young people. Exposure to wonderful people, products, opportunities and ideas from all around the globe is not.
Jensson
> Economic inequality surely is contributing to depression in young people. Exposure to wonderful people, products, opportunities and ideas from all around the globe is not.
Those two are linked though, exposure to competition from all around the world is the problem you are talking about. You can't have both these opportunities and avoid competition.
I do think this freedom is a good thing, but I also understand it leads to inequality. That is why globalism was typically a right wing position since it helps the rich.
PleasureBot
Globalization is not the cause of economic inequality. The cause is political and cultural. Since the late 1970's, the top 1% of income earners (> ~$800,000 in income) in the United States has captured 60% of economic growth as income. The top 10% (> ~$200,00 in income) of earners captured 90% of the growth. The bottom 90% of the population has captured only had 10% of the growth in wages over that time period. The US now has might have the highest income inequality that we know of in all societies, present and historical. For example, India from 40 years ago that had a strict caste system and half the population was illiterate was more egalitarian the the current day US. Apartheid South Africa was more egalitarian than the current day US.
This started in the late 70s as that is when we started dropping the progressive tax on high income earners extremely low. This incentivized senior managers at companies, who set their own compensation, to set higher and higher wages for themselves, capturing most of the economic growth of the past 50 years.
Whether you think this type of inequality is justified or not, its worth looking at closely because it is hard to imagine an economy or society continuing to function indefinitely with such extreme difference in outcome between different social groups.
thomassmith65
No nation on Earth is entirely isolationist.
No nation has absolute free trade.
The question is what to aim for.
All else being equal, globalization is better.
peepeepoopoo119
[flagged]
matwood
The US has enjoyed amazing prosperity, but it was squandered by allowing the majority to only go to the 1% instead of spreading it around through programs like universal healthcare and free education. Thinking that workers would still be working if it just wasn't for globalization is completely ignoring automation. Add in that very few people want to do work that is long and dangerous, and it made sense to send it elsewhere and move up the value chain.
thomassmith65
In today's world, capital interests use thinly veiled slave labor while passing on very little of the economic pie to American workers.
wood_spirit
Globalisation is about comparative advantage.
Some of America’s comparative advantages that we see a lot of on HN has been designing chips, online services and financial services etc. Also the defence industrial complex. There are probably more.
In general todays Americans don’t want to work in factories any more, and factory owners don’t want workers these days either: they want robots. Witness all Musk has said about workers being temporary while he gets robots at Tesla since the start etc.
renewiltord
Yes, exactly. It's why everyone is obsessed with 'inequality' these days. They all have a better life than my childhood was and I was happy then and I'm happy now. The difference is that I'm not always looking in the other guy's bowl to see if he has more than me.
keybored
I’ll save it as the ultimate “just be positive” slogan as the world gets worse and worse.
Young adults got tossed into Covid lockdown as teens and higher education students. They worry about climate change. Wars have always happened but now with Ukraine it’s happening in proximity to the West. The second Trump administration is much worse than the first. The old “getting a better life than your parents” isn’t looking great, in fact it’s trending downward.
That people are perhaps more toxically “tuned in” to what everyone else is doing is just the cherry on top of objective reality.
logicchains
That's victim blaming, to suggest the problem is that young people are comparing themselves to their parents' generation, rather than the problem being that their parents' generation has made the world worse for their children.
jader201
I don't think the parent comment is passing blame on a particular generation -- they're simply blaming the state of the era we're living in, and the tools that are available to all of us, including the younger generation that has (always had) less self discipline to moderate their behavior and addition to these tools.
fullshark
They are comparing their lives to completely phony ones on the internet and finding it wanting. The no. 1 job they aspire to is influencer, because they see it as the ideal life, cause it's painted as such.
mtalantikite
Well that's what happens when everything is 2x as expensive as it used to be.
testfrequency
Millennials have been complaining about this for a while now and we’ve been called lazy.
Now it’s Gen Z being lazy.
Crazy how every generation that didn’t get a fair opportunity to live a relatively normal life off normal income is considered “lazy” by the superiors
alphazard
Young people have most or all of their net worth in cash because they aren't worth much yet, and you need cash to pay for things. They are also more dependent on their job, which pays them in dollars, because they will run out of money quickly without one.
Given all that, it baffles me that young people don't identify the economy and inflation specifically as the most important political issue. They're always complaining about stuff that people tell them to care about, not things that materially affect their ability to sustain themselves.
btouellette
That would only make sense if they had a lot of net worth which is clearly not the case. If they have $400 in their checking account and a ton of student loans or other debt inflation is actually great for them.
Havoc
Well yeah - they're pretty fucked to put it bluntly. The social contract while not entire broken is just broken enough to make things near impossible. Can't afford a house. Can't afford an education. Can't afford a family. Can't even get a proper job anymore (offshoring/gig economy/zero hour contracts)
All gets chalked up to laziness / too much avocado toast etc, when the truth is the goal posts have shifted to such an extent that for many scoring a goal is no longer plausible no matter how hard they try. This chart captures it best:
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/e1jrvw/oc_...
I'm sorta on the edge of this (millenial) but man do I have sorry for the younger gen
preordained
They are utterly cooked. The only ones I've ever seen on the "it's not so bad" side of this argument are aloof boomers and anyone young enough to never have experienced at least a good swath of the 90s--i.e. has no truly visceral basis for comparison/has no clue how bloodless and sick the vampires have left society
swatcoder
To be happy, most people need a map to where happiness lies and a sense that they're in the right place on that map.
Insomuch as the only map most people now have points towards upper middle class consumerism, with a big house of their own, a well-stamped passport, and an enjoyable career that isn't too pressured, of course most people are going to be unhappy.
If we ever might pave a wide highway to that as a society, we're centuries away from doing so, not years. It's not a good map for current generations.
Without sacrificing the positives of secularism and liberal ideals of mutual respect and equal opportunity, we urgently need to figure out a new way to give people more reasonable maps about where they can find happiness without the consumer luxuries they'll probably not be able to have.
monkeyelite
[flagged]
LatteLazy
Society used to be run for everyone. Now it’s run for the old at the expense of the young. That’s true of politics, economics, media, basically everything.
wesleyoneal
Society has never once, at any single point in all of it’s history, been “run for everyone”
bequanna
I think what the parent means is that traditionally society is run with all age groups considered important.
A strong focus on the future with the aged proud of the sacrifices they make for the young.
Elders now are concerned with maximum, selfish value extraction and consumption.
They seem to detest and resent the youth and have done whatever possible to structure society in their favor with little regard for what will happen when they are gone.
nh23423fefe
Wasn't like that before, isn't like that now.
haunter
Insert 'we live in a society' meme
lotsofpulp
It seems inevitable in societies with flat or top heavy population age histograms, especially in a democracy.
miningape
It seems inevitable in self-interested societies with flat or top heavy population age histograms, especially in a democracy.
Empires grow great when the old plant trees for the shade they'll never sit in.
jofla_net
Shit, could you imagine boomers with that mindset. The last time i remember being around old folks with that mentality i was in high school, i swear they did exist though. Lots of wonderful old folks with perspective. I miss them. I'd say if they were still around theyd be well over 100 now.
aaroninsf
If this were Reddit, it'd qualify for r/noshitsherlock
Those holding power today are a generation that never ceded power in the fashion that previous generations did, which directly contributes to the contemporary shitshow of abominable wealth inequity married to the ossified world view, lack of sophistication and comprehension of either contemporary problems nor their solutions, and lack of timeline, characteristic of their ages.
While there is no shortage of shrill grifters and abused now abusive collaborators, we are ruled by a bunch of selfish morons and sociopaths in their 70s, many of who are showing active cognitive decline.
Why would anyone be happy? This is literally the worst historical moment I have lived and I'm not young myself, and I lived through the Cold War and 9/11.
The destruction being wrought in and by the US today is literally incalcuable, a total dismantling of generations of work and careers spent dedicating genius and sweat toward a vision now being shit on openly by those who apparently literally believe they can change reality simply by force-feeding idiocy through entirely owned or coopted media channels on an impoverished fearful populace 24/7.
The sooner we see a general strike the better.
Which hopefully will result from the entirely predictable absolute economic devastation as tariffs bite.
It's January 2020—how are you preparing?
Tick tock.
incomingpain
If you were to go back to 1625, so 400 years ago.
What did people do to be happy on your average midweek night? No shakespeare every night. No festival. Just the average night?
You went to the local pub, had a good meal, got drunk, and smoked some pipe.
But can the modern guy go do that anymore?
You cant afford to get drunk, federal alcohol excise tax is $13/litre. LCBO(govt monopoly) markup is 100%, ontario basic alcohol tax is 30-60% retail price. environmental levy is 10-20cents but you can return that to get a refund. You still pay a sales tax of course.
You go to the LCBO and $40 for 1Litre but that's >75% taxes.
You then reach for the tobacco pipe and they have >90% taxes on tobacco.
So what happens? People dont go socialize at the pub anymore. Smoking is uncommon, no smoking socializing.
You sit at home alone and shakespeare and chill from your curated streaming choice. How depressing.
matwood
I hope this is parody. The average life expectancy was 35-40. The average person was working 12 hours/day with much of it being heavy labor. No one was going to the pub or having a good meal, they were just trying to survive. I don't understand this romanticization of the past. Does everyone just assume they would be the king? Even then, they would still be worse off than nearly everyone in a modern economy today.
ahaushsbsuav
The life expectancy was primarily due to child death. Which, while tragic, doesn’t have much to do with the parents point.
During the mini warming period in medieval England peasants had enough free time that they contributed their labor to building beautiful churches we still see today. Generalizations like “everyone was happy/angry at all times in the past” are not accurate. There were times of both, and we should look to the times that were good to determine what needs to change in our future.
You don’t need to be king to be happy. A meaningful job with a family, friends, and a country you feel connected too is likely enough for most people.
incomingpain
>The average life expectancy was 35-40.
I'm not even arguing that we drink and smoke ourselves to happy. The point was the socialization. Our society has not replaced this.
High taxation on alcohol and tobacco does not by itself increase life expectancy. That's absolutely not a thing.
You also obviously fact checked this before posting not realizing that it was bubonic plague year and that infant mortality is the key problem here. People who were 35 werent expected to die any year. If you were 35 you'd still live several decades.
No I dont think smoking and drinking at a pub causes infant mortality.
>The average person was working 12 hours/day with much of it being heavy labor.
And high taxation on alcohol and tobacco does not reduce the amount of labour hours per day.
You're arguing against living in the era which is not something I was arguing for.
>No one was going to the pub or having a good meal, they were just trying to survive.
No actually going to the pub was fundamentally something you did every single day regardless of social class.
> I don't understand this romanticization of the past. Does everyone just assume they would be the king? Even then, they would still be worse off than nearly everyone in a modern economy today.
I was never doing that.
bobxmax
lol and any children you have will likely die horribly before your eyes, good chance you'll die of something terrible like diarrhea or the plague, and whenever you need medical care there's no anesthetic (your wife will LOVE childbirth)
oh and you're probably dragged into war at some point, and you eat stale bread once a day. you didn't "have a good meal" at the pub.
the lack of perspective priviledged westerners have blows my goddamn mind. and no, people didn't get "happiness" in the past by being in a constant state of alcoholism - they did it because they couldnt' afford clean water
modern man isn't happy because they have no resilience and are deeply entitled. that's why you have more than any of your ancestors could have dreamed of but you think you're opressed and struggling
sorry but it's pathetic
FirmwareBurner
Probably because they grew up and started having to pay bills and taxes.
ArnoVW
I think that with “as they used to” they mean “as other young people of the same age before them” and not “now that they have grown up”
koakuma-chan
It's not about money, it's about the lack of hope.
Apocryphon
How do they do that in the EU, with the youth unemployment rates?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266228/youth-unemploymen...
trollbridge
They're having the exact same malaise we're having in North America and ANZ.
bigyabai
[flagged]
I can afford a personal burrito taxi - but I rent a tiny one bed for 40% of my salary and starting a family seems out of reach with childcare costs at £3k/mo. The older generations - having landed themselves, became treatlers. Their entire political philosophy is cheap treats. While cheap crap, knick-knacks, fast food and all-inclusive vacations have gotten cheaper; the real meaningful parts of life have drifted out of reach.