The kids, it’s been suggested, are not okay.

For decades, established research showed that happiness and well-being levels tend to peak during youth in your late teens and 20s, drop during midlife, and rise again in old age. But this U-shaped happiness curve is now morphing, according to the results from a recent global study: Many of the world’s young people are not flourishing.

“Young people — and this is a universal finding — in general, are not doing well,” says Byron Johnson, the director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and a co-author of the study. “That U is becoming a J. It’s flattening. That’s cause for concern, not just here in the United States, but it’s cause for concern all over the world.”

The results come from the Global Flourishing Study, a multiyear project from researchers at Harvard and Baylor that uses survey data from Gallup to measure levels of well-being worldwide. Data was collected between 2022 and 2024 from over 200,000 adults in 23 countries and territories.........

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