By many objective measures, people today are growing up in one of the most materially prosperous periods in history. They have greater access to education, healthcare, and information than previous generations. Technological innovation has reshaped daily life in ways that would have been unimaginable even a few decades ago.

Yet despite continued economic growth, recent global happiness reports place the United States lower in life satisfaction than in previous years. Self-reported well-being has been steadily declining. According to the Global Flourishing Study, Gen Z and younger Millennials have the lowest self-reported well-being in the nation, with many feeling that their lives don’t matter and that their work has no meaning. Older Millennials are doing a little better, but still not great, with midlife pressures mounting. Gen Xers and Baby Boomers are doing best out of all the generations, but are still not doing as well as previous generations at their age.

In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy described loneliness and social isolation as a public health epidemic, noting their widespread psychological and physiological consequences.

This raises an uncomfortable question: Why do people feel less happy even as society becomes richer?

Social Comparison and a Zero-Sum Game

One explanation focuses on social comparison. For most of human history, people compared themselves primarily to those around them—neighbors, classmates, coworkers. Today, social media sets the standard to include carefully curated portrayals of success from across the globe. Teenagers scrolling through images of strangers’ achievements, travels, or relationships may perpetually feel like they aren’t living their best lives, even when they are doing pretty well, if they compare themselves to how people around them actually live.

Social comparison with online influencers also creates a zero-sum game, where someone else’s high visibility can make it feel like you’re invisible. Research has linked this dynamic to increased anxiety and depressive symptoms among adolescents, whose developing sense of self-worth has increasingly become tied to how they are perceived by others, even strangers.

But comparison alone does not explain the broader trend. A deeper issue may lie in how “living your best life” is defined.

How We Define Living Well

Young people today are often encouraged to treat happiness and success as something to post about. Take a look at your feed, and you will see all the humble and not-so-humble brags about people’s achievements and moments of bliss.

Because we are searching for moments to share with our online friends, rather than sharing life’s moments with our IRL friends, we pursue external markers with the hope that happiness will follow. When those markers are achieved, however, we don’t feel the same way that our curated post conveys. We get disappointed that the external marker didn’t hit the mark of what we wanted internally.

For many young people, the result is a mismatch between aspiration and experience. They may see what they think is the path to success—pursue the degree, secure the internship, buy that amazing outfit, have that crazy night or vacation—but the day-to-day reality of that path may feel disconnected from what sustains their sense of meaning or belonging.

This gap matters because happiness is lived primarily in ordinary moments. It emerges through activities, connections, and commitments that reflect what individuals care about—not what they can necessarily post about.

Economic growth can improve the quality of life in many important ways. But beyond a certain threshold, additional resources may do less to influence how people experience their everyday lives. Other factors—such as social connection, autonomy, a sense of belonging—begin to play a more significant role.

Simply telling young people to spend less time on social media is unlikely to improve their well-being. Teenagers and young adults tend to exhibit high levels of psychological reactance, which is the motivational response that arises when people feel their freedom to choose is being restricted. (Think about when adults tell their teenage children to clean their room or do anything at all!) Telling them simply to get off social media would most likely lead them to resist or double down on the very behavior they are being told to avoid. The key to changing social media habits is to recognize that the impulse to scroll is often triggered by something deeper —whether that be boredom, loneliness, or the desire for connection—and then introduce a different way to satisfy the underlying need they are craving but are not actually getting through social media.

If we can find a way to recognize the cues but change the routine so that people obtain what they actually want, we can allow social comparison to give way to social connection. That is the challenge that we face today.

For Gen Z, especially, navigating an environment that emphasizes displays of achievement while undermining connection creates the stress of having unprecedented opportunities paired with persistent dissatisfaction. To resolve it, we must realize that feeling better may depend less on acquiring more—and more on how we choose to live with what we already have while thinking hard about what else is worth wanting.

© Psychology Today