Young Adults Now Flourish Least, and Purpose Can Help

If your son or daughter is in their twenties, you may have heard it in their voice: a good job, a full diary, and still a feeling of being lost, with no clear sense of what it is all for. You are not imagining it. For the first time in decades of research, young adults in many countries report lower wellbeing than any other age group.

The old happiness curve has broken

For most of the last half-century, wellbeing followed a familiar U-shape. It started high in youth, dipped in midlife and rose again in later years. That pattern has broken.