Wednesdata - June 5 - Gen Z is Shockingly Unhappy

More money, more problems

A weird ramp up for this post. The local paper, the Star Tribune, had an article about Millennial hardship.

The end of the article talks about US Millennials as a distinctly unhappy generation.

I’m not entirely sure about this - we Millennials seem a little too happy, in my opinion. When I think about an unhappy generation, I think about Gen Z.

Happiness Across Generations

I used GSS data from 1972 to 2021 to look at happiness by birth cohorts. I started out simply looking at mean happiness levels.

Higher values, more happiness. We see that Millennials are slightly less happy than older generations, but not by much. Gen Z, on the other hand, is very strange for how unhappy they are.

Perhaps some of the variation above simply reflects different cohorts measured at different ages and eras? I controlled for age and year and got the following:

Millennials and Gen X are slightly happier generations. Gen Z is distinctly miserable.

Let’s look at cohort trajectories over time to see if anything pops out

Millennials were unhappy through the 2000s, but the cohort’s happiness rose steadily during this time, with the cohort eventually looking like everyone else.

Gen Z has been growing increasingly unhappy with every passing year, and took the pandemic especially hard.

You can see the pandemic show up for everyone with the massive decline at the end of each cohort-specific trajectory. Millennials were unhappier in their 30s compared to other cohorts, but were fast catching up. And Millennials were not any more or less happy in their 20s than other cohorts.

Gen Z started out miserable and has only become more miserable as they have gotten older.

Gen Z is living the prophetic warning harkened by the Notorious BIG - “More Money, More Problems.”

I changed the Economist cartoon to better fit the intergenerational trends.