Key points
- Youth happiness has collapsed, with no promise of the U-curve of happiness applying to the current generation.
- Today’s teens face a true poly-crisis world—from COVID scars to AI upheaval, all during their formative years.
- Uncertainty will remain a constant, and resilience requires breadth and adaptability over narrow mastery.
- Preparing youth for uncertainty means optionality, offering more doors to walk through.
How we experience happiness used to follow a predictable rhythm.
For decades, researchers across psychology and economics identified a stable “U-curve” of life satisfaction. We start off high as children, dip in early adulthood under the weight of responsibility and uncertainty, and rebound in old age once perspective softens the sharper edges of life.
This was never some immutable law of nature, mind you. It was an artefact of the way our lives stacked up. Bills and childcare and career ambition tend to collide in the middle years, only to give way later to more freedom, more perspective, and more time for ourselves.
These golden years still exist, at least for prior generations reporting them today. What has changed, as David Blanchflower and others now show, is the left side of the curve, which now traces more of a 45-degree angle than a U. Youth are now beginning their lives in a state of ill-being, and unless we change the conditions around them, we might see the trajectory they trace flatten out entirely.
From U-Curve to Free Fall: Why Youth Can't Find Footing
The data could not be clearer: Rates of anxiety, depression, and even suicidal ideation among adolescents and young adults are rising to historic highs.
Edgar Morin and Anne Kerne once wrote about “poly-crisis” as an abstract condition, but for today’s youth, it is their lived reality. A childhood shaped by COVID-19’s isolation has led to an adolescence haunted by climate change headlines, geopolitical conflict, and now the uncertainty of artificial intelligence reshaping the very careers they are told to prepare for.
At the very moment they are meant to be building identities and establishing agency, the ground beneath them shifts with unnerving speed. Erik Erikson described adolescence as a crucible for identity formation, but what happens when that crucible is filled with nothing but volatility and no roles for them to fill?
A wealth of research shows that adversity during formative years leaves deeper scars than adversity later in life, and when the world itself feels like quicksand, it is no wonder that life satisfaction is slipping away. The U-curve once promised that life satisfaction would return with age, but even that promise might no longer hold. With uncertainty only deepening, the risk is not just a dip, but a decline that keeps steepening over time.
This generation may not rebound—unless we intervene with purpose, preparing them not for stability that may never come, but for uncertainty that surely will.
Teaching Survival Skills for the Unpredictable Century
Uncertainty asks more of young people than we are giving them today. Our institutions are still structured for a linear world that no longer exists, beginning with degree programs that assume a straight line from school to a job turns into a career. Yet the jobs themselves are being hollowed out, first by automation, then by outsourcing, now by AI, and even the ones that remain are often left with less meaning to give.
We do our youth a disservice by shepherding them into ever-narrower tracks—from elite sports to ambitious extracurriculars and hyper-specialized majors, as if life still rewards those who grind out their 10,000 hours in one domain. What looks like mastery too often ends up as sunk cost, and when the promised future job disappears, the years invested turn into years wasted.
The antidote we need is fostering resilience through diversity of skills, not depth in one alone. We need more polymaths who are resilient through curiosity instead of specialists who are fragile by design.
Lateral thinkers, polymaths, and those comfortable moving across domains fare better in uncertain environments. Studies in organizational psychology show that individuals with more diverse learning experiences demonstrate greater resilience, adaptability, and creative problem-solving under stress. Breadth, not just depth, is the new survival skill, and we need to get a move on with teaching it.
That means exposing young people to the messy realities of the real world much earlier than we do today. We need to, for example, set them up with internships that show them work in progress rather than perfected career paths, and they deserve curricula that incentivize exploration as much as performance. The most powerful gift we can offer is optionality and the ability to open more doors, because none of us knows which ones will stay open.
Change will also require us to rethink our cultural narratives around passion and performance. “Follow your passion” has become a form of performative peer pressure, where not having one at 18 is seen as a fatal blow against any career hopes one might have.
Yet today, being stuck with just one passion is equally dangerous. Flourishing under uncertainty will mean normalizing the winding path, rewarding curiosity, and valuing the skill of adaptation as highly as the skill of persistence.
Adapting to Life in a New World
The poly-crisis world isn’t going away, but what can change is how we prepare the next generation to live within it. If the old model was to promise stability, the new model must be to cultivate adaptability. We cannot erase uncertainty, but we can equip them to thrive inside it.
And if we do not, then the breaking will continue, much faster than we can mend it.