Abstract
Abstract
Research on the age profile of well-being long placed its low point in midlife. In the United States, young adults’ mean happiness was slightly below that of the middle-aged, but in several periods fewer of them described themselves as not too happy, and fewer reported serious psychological distress. Recent evidence suggests the young have become the least happy age group, and two explanations compete. On one reading the decline belongs to the times, pressing on whoever is currently young; on the other it belongs to the people, traveling with recent birth cohorts as they age. Little United States evidence distinguishes the two. This study tests them against each other in the General Social Survey, using 69,632 respondents across thirty-five waves from 1972 to 2024, with a replication on psychological distress in the National Health Interview Survey from 1997 to 2024. Same-age comparisons across cohorts, adjusted for period conditions, show that every cohort born between 1945 and 1984 reported nearly identical happiness at the same young-adult ages. The deficit begins abruptly with the cohorts born after 1995, who are less happy than any predecessor cohort at every age observed. The distress data show the same step, part of it measured before either survey changed its interview mode. Because both surveys are repeated cross-sections, the findings describe cohort averages, and they may partly reflect how recent cohorts report their well-being. Services and monitoring will need to follow the affected cohorts rather than youth as an age bracket.