Are You Happier Than a Typical American?

Source: Like a Fool, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

According to a World Gallup Poll, the happiest people tend to live in Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden. The United States as a country ranks 23rd, just ahead of Germany and Mexico. However, relative happiness in the US varies by generation. For example, Boomers are the happiest and Gen Zers are the unhappiest—although Boomers might eventually rank second from the bottom once Generation Alphas are assessed. For the moment, the generation least happy with their life circumstances are the Zoomers, for reasons that are at this point unknown—though some blame smartphones (see discussion below).

Defining Happiness

Three relevant measures were assessed by Gallup:

1. Positive Emotions: laughter, enjoyment, and interest
2. Negative Emotions: worry, sadness, and anger
3. Life Evaluations: assessed by rating current life from the best possible life (10 points) to the worst (0 points)

The last, Life Evaluations, provides the most informative data because this measure captures the quality of life in a more complete and stable way; reports of emotions are usually derived from daily experiences, which can considerably fluctuate within a day and across days. In addition, the World Gallup Report noted that Gen Z girls and young women have considerably more negative emotions than Gen Z boys and young men, the largest sex gap among the generational groups. This is not an issue I address in this edition.

Generation Z

Perhaps most disconcerting, Zoomers’ happiness ranked 62nd among peers across the world, frequently just ahead of youths in other countries who have been scarred from war, genocide, and famine. This fact alarms and puzzles many commentators, especially psychologists and sociologists who question what could be so devasting to US teens and young adults to cause their high level of unhappiness. These speculations have generated considerable discussion and debates with a primary focus on the impact of social media and access to it—the smartphone.

Indeed, The Happiness Report agrees in its conclusion: “The fundamental shift in how adolescents spend their leisure time may explain the marked decline in adolescent well-being.” The dramatic increase during the past decade in the “amount of time adolescents spend on screen activities (especially digital media such as gaming, social media, texting, and time online) has steadily increased” with the dramatic acceleration of smartphones. Prior to the outset of Covid, in 2018 a Pew survey found 95% of adolescents had access to a smartphone and nearly half said they were online “almost constantly.” While online time has increased, youths are spending “less time interacting with each other in person, including getting together with friends, socializing, and going to parties.” The result, according to various researchers, is that being online with digital media is linked to lower levels of happiness.

To assess these conclusions, two University of Oxford professors, Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, reviewed the research, published their findings in Nature Human Behaviour, and discussed them in a New York Times article. They found the negative relationship between psychological well-being and the use of digital technology was extraordinarily weak, “explaining at most 0.4% of the variation in well-being.” They viewed the relationship as too small to warrant policy consideration. Other factors such as smoking marijuana and being bullied are far more closely linked with decreased well-being than smartphones; on the other hand, getting sufficient sleep and eating a regular breakfast were closely tied to adolescent happiness.

They concluded that their findings do not mean that having and assessing smartphones is either necessarily risky or necessarily healthy for teenagers. Perhaps for most, the two balance each other out. For example, smartphones could have significant benefits by connecting youths with desired others. Spurts of digital images, videos, or texts, especially if humorous might give momentary pleasure to an adolescent—although this might not sustain happiness over time. Indeed, such memes could also remind adolescents of how dull their own life is, thus enhancing a sense of failure because it implies they are living an unglamorous life when compared to their peers. As Berkeley’s professor Ronald Dahl succinctly summarized, “A screen-related activity may be beneficial or harmful depending on who is doing it, how much they’re doing it, when they’re doing it and what they’re not doing instead.”

The Causation Problem

The flow of causation between smartphones and unhappiness is difficult to assess. The analyses presented thus far are generally correlational and do not establish causation. Perhaps those who are most unhappy are those who go to their smartphone to find relief and a smile. The phone might not be their preferred choice of entertainment or interaction but it might be the easiest to assess; some youths might feel they have no simple alternative because all of their friends are on their phones and not socializing face-to-face.

My Recommendation

As adults, we should spend less time trying to parse what makes our youths unhappy and instead focus on what makes our daughters and sons happy.

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