Why teens are choosing happiness

Happiness isn’t just a concept for adults to grapple with; it’s on the teen radar too.

78% of European teens agree “Choosing to be happy is more important than anything else you can do in your life”. To understand why, we need to step back and consider some difficult truths. One of the things which marks this generation out from others before is what tech theorist Tom Chatfield sees as “an accelerated education in reality”. This hyper-exposure to the world has driven a very instinctive sense for teens that happiness is not a given: we see and follow the divisions and challenges that compromise wider social wellbeing; we see our parents’ generation struggle with their search for happiness and moreover, recent studies show rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents have increased in recent decades.

Let's face it, though: if there were more happy adults, there’d be more happy teenagers; we’re all in the soup together. And for the first time in generations, there are fewer promises of a comfortable future, as the transition from teenhood into adulthood becomes more complicated: we, today, cannot assume the jobs and affluence that our parents did. In 2014 the youth unemployment rate in the euro area stood at an unprecedented 23% (well over that of 2007) and looking ahead for the GenZ, a more long-term problem with financial and employment looms. These are major shifts in the social, economic and cultural conditions which shape this generation's attitudes to life and happiness. What’s heartening is that the difficulty of these conditions isn’t holding us back in our aspirations for happiness. Quite the opposite…

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