Why Are Millennials So Unhappy?

Buckle up.

Young people in America are unhappy.

This isn’t an opinion — the data shows it.

The World Happiness Report ranks 143 countries across measures of life satisfaction. In 2023, the U.S. dropped to 23rd in the world, marking the first time it had not been considered one of the top 20 happiest countries since the report started in 2003.

Young Americans ain’t happy.

Americans older than age 60 ranked 10th for happiness. Americans under 60 ranked significantly lower, dragging down the average.

If you’re in the 18-35 demographic and you’re reading this right now, you’re saying something like: 

“Duh. The economy is in shambles. Boomers control the wealth. I can’t afford a house.”

Then, you’re gesturing broadly at the election-induced mania in front of you.

“Not to mention … all of this.”

So why are so many Millennials dissatisfied? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Before we get started, three notes:

1. This will be the longest blog I’ve ever written. I warned you. 

2. The World Happiness Report highlighted how unhappy Americans under 30 are. In the US, levels of self-reported happiness tend to increase by generation. AKA: The older you are, the happier you report you are. Since I’m a Millennial, I’m going to write more about my generation — primarily those of us aged 30-40 — as opposed to Gen Z/Gen Alpha under age 30. Good luck figuring them out.

3. If you want to understand more of the economic reasons behind how this all happened, leave my blog now and read this instead. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read on the internet and should be required annual reading for everyone. We’re going to highlight some of the points from that piece in this blog, but you should read the whole thing regardless. 

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So: Young people in America are unhappy.

Now, for our big, hairy, audacious question: Why?

Any time we try to assign reason to large statistical groups, we have to acknowledge that groups are made up of individual people. That might sound obvious, but it’s a critical point. Flesh-and-blood humans are individuals with unique experiences, motivations, and circumstances that cannot be fully understood or represented through statistics alone. 

Another way to say this: There are ~72 million Millennials. So it’s impossible to come up with one specific answer as to why 10s of millions of people are unhappy. For one person, it might be an inability to find a job. For another, it might be depression. For someone else, it could be family dynamics. 

Point is, there is no one specific root cause for a 50-state forest. So what you’re about to read is not meant to be a comprehensive diagnosis — just a theory into one cause of the symptoms.

But even though all 72 million Millennials are 72 million individuals, we share similarities. One key similarity is that most of us were raised by the same generation of parents. And when we try to understand why so Millennials are unhappy, this is crucial to understand.

Here’s the thesis I’m about to defend:

Unhappiness in Millennials is partially due to unrealistic personal expectations as opposed to any outside political, economic, or social forces.

Ready?

Let’s go.

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Why our parents matter

Here’s a quick summary of the article I referenced before: How This All Happened by Morgan Housel.

1940s-1950s: 

• World War II ends. 

• Millions of soldiers return home. 

• Demand for housing, jobs, and consumer goods skyrockets. 

To avoid a post-war recession, the U.S. boosts its economy via things like low interest rates and the GI Bill. Consumer spending is encouraged. For the first time, so is debt. This means U.S. families are now taking on debt to buy things — refrigerators, cars, electricity. You name it. 

As consumer spending increased, wages shot up. From 1940-1948, average wages doubled.

Housel:

So the Baby Boomer generation grows up in an environment where lifestyles across all income levels appear similar. The gap between the rich and the poor is less of a canyon and more of a ditch.

1960s-1970: 

We’re oversimplifying here, but the story continues. Expectations for a “shared prosperity” lifestyle persist. People continue to believe — and expect — that most Americans can and should live a similar lifestyle regardless of income level.

1970-1980:

Stuff starts to shift in 1973. A recession begins, inflation jumps, and short-term interest rates hit 8%. If you’ve gotten used to taking out a bunch of cheap debt to finance a better lifestyle, this is a problem. Especially, as Housel puts it, if your “expectations of how [your] lifestyle should compare to [your] peers did not change.”

The poor and middle classes have been conditioned to expect to live like the rich, and they’re going to continue to cling to that expectation — even if it means taking on debt they can’t afford.

1980s: 

In 1980, the oldest Baby Boomers are 34. The youngest are 16. The world they’ve lived in — up to this point — has been one of relative economic equality. 

But in the 1980s, fueled by higher rates, tax cuts for higher-income earners, and other shifting economic policies, the wealthy start to break away in terms of lifestyle. Higher earners can still afford nicer things. Lower earners can’t. 

Logically, you should never take out debt you can’t afford to pay back. But we know people aren’t logical. 

So instead of peeling back their lifestyles and accepting lifestyle separation between economic classes, many people decided to continue to fund better lifestyles with high-rate debt. 

You might know this as, “Keeping Up with The Joneses.” 

Housel:

No one forced Peter to take out a huge mortgage and $45,000 of credit card debt, but he did it anyway. After all, that’s how the world is supposed to work, right? Everyone should have access to the same opportunity and the same lifestyle. For many Baby Boomers — whether they were aware of it or not — this was the mentality. 

At this point, Baby Boomers are having children. In 1981, the first Millennial is born. (Officially, Millennials are 1981-1996.) So Millennials are born into this weird — and rickety — economic inflection point. Baby Boomer parents are clinging to outdated expectations for lifestyle similarities across classes, and are willing to put themselves in financially sickening situations to make those expectations a surface-level reality.

But, of course, because money is a taboo topic, Millennial children are never told this. They just know that their family has 1,500 square feet to live in, two cars to drive, and 1.3 siblings to annoy them.

Housel:

Today, these children — us Millennials — are primarily in our 30s and 40s.

And guess what we grew up expecting?

The same things our parents had.

But what we didn’t take into account?

Many of them couldn’t afford it.

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And now, here we are.

Millions of Millennials grew up amid a mirage of economic prosperity, never realizing that Oz’s Curtain was covering up mountains of debt and thin threads of purse strings barely being held together.

So generational expectations are broken from the start — but no one ever tells you that. And to make matters worse, a young person’s expectations for what their life should be are more disconnected from reality than in any other period in history.

Yes, social media is a major culprit. Obviously.

But there are so many quieter and more sinister forces at work wrecking your expectations for what a happy life looks like than you realize. 

Earlier, I told you my thesis:

Unhappiness in young Americans is partially due to unrealistic personal expectations as opposed to any outside political, economic, or social forces.

Here are a couple of examples — one objective and one subjective — that illustrate what I mean:

1. Housing

In 1949 — back when the rich and the poor were first starting to live more similar lifestyles — the average home size was 909 square feet.

In 2021, it’s about 2,500 square feet.

What happens when homes get bigger? Homes cost more. 

Oh, and by the way, the average U.S. household size in 1950 was 3.4 people. In 2023, that number was 2.5 people.

That means that even though the average number of people living in a home has decreased by 25% over that time, the average home size has almost tripled.

This growth reflects the growth of society’s expectations. We’re no longer satisfied with what used to be good enough.

2. Job satisfaction

I first saw the two charts below when reading Tim Urban’s “Wait But Why” blog, which discusses a lot of the themes we’re breaking down here.

Urban notes that the phrases “a secure career” and “a fulfilling career” are significantly negatively correlated — and started trending that way 30-40 years ago. You know — right when Millennials were growing up.

For generation after generation, secure careers were enough. Then, the zeitgeist changed. And careers were meant to be fulfilling.

I’m not saying your career shouldn’t be fulfilling — hell, I quit a secure career to chase fulfillment. But again, my point is that for a long time people didn’t expect to have fulfilling careers. They got a job. They worked. They made some money.

Now, a lot of Millennials want jobs that make us happy. But we also want jobs that pay well. I’m not arguing whether any of this is right or wrong or deserved or undeserved. I’m simply saying that our expectations for what we should have are higher today than in any other period in history.

Data per Google’s Ngram viewer, a tool that shows how prominently a given phrase appears in English print over any period of time...

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The idea that happiness = reality/expectations is not a novel concept.

But maybe it helps to try to understand why reality ends up falling short of expectations for so many people.

You can say that the passage of time and the advancement of society should naturally bring a higher standard of living. And you’d be right. It has. In so, so many ways. Part of why we expect so much today is because the world is constantly becoming so much better that major leaps in progress feel like a given.

But maybe the most important thing to understand when trying to grasp happiness is how much of what you’ve witnessed from other people throughout your life has been curated with the intention of eliminating context and hiding tradeoffs. We talked about it already with the upbringing so many Millennials had — the guise of wealth hidden behind a curtain of financial instability. 

Here’s the simple truth:

In past generations, different economic classes had similar lifestyles. That’s no longer the case. 

I’m not trying to argue why this happened. I’m not trying to argue how to get it back. Both of those conversations are for people far, far smarter than me. 

I’m just trying to shine some light on the generational aspect of expectations and why so many people end up unsatisfied due to living life out of alignment with those expectations. If beliefs, behavioral patterns, and trauma are generational, why wouldn’t expectations be, too?

And because of the nature of generational conditioning, so much of this has been instilled in you subconsciously. I believe these expectations are ingrained at an almost cellular level. That is — you might be affected by these concepts, but not even know it. As Carl Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Not only have the rich separated themselves from the poor and middle classes over the past ~40 years, but in the past 10, we’ve been given a front-row seat to in-your-face wealth via social media. And subconscious generational conditioning tells us we should have similar access to a similar lifestyle — because that’s how the country worked when our parents were growing up.

So I think a lot of unhappiness comes from people who shudder at the thought of driving their Honda Accord home from their corporate 9-5 to their ranch home in Anytown, USA, believing they’re either owed more or destined to get more, all the while forgetting they’re living a life 99.99% of humans to ever walk the earth would have killed for (many of them literally).

This isn’t me telling you to be complacent or to give up on trying to improve your lifestyle. Far from it. If anything, this highlights that ambition is more important than it's ever been if you want to climb into a new social or economic class. It used to be easier. Today, it’s harder.

That’s a lot of words to say this:

Ambition is good. But being normal isn’t bad. 

Happiness is now, has always been, and will always be, the gap between your expectations and reality. And maybe by partially understanding why our expectations are so high, we can learn to manage them, put them in context, and be happy even if they aren’t fully met.