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. To measure flourishing, researchers surveyed participants in core areas such as happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health,........

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