Young people are becoming less happy than older generations as they suffer “the equivalent of a midlife crisis”, global research has revealed as America’s top doctor warned that “young people are really struggling”.
Dr Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, said allowing children to use social media was like giving them medicine that is not proven to be safe. He said the failure of governments to better regulate social media in recent years was “insane”.
Murthy spoke to the Guardian as new data revealed that young people across North America were now less happy than their elders, with the same “historic” shift expected to follow in western Europe.
Declining wellbeing among under-30s has driven the US out of the top 20 list of happiest nations, the 2024 World Happiness Report revealed.
I think maybe it isn’t the social media itself but the fact that we are letting impressionable kids be exposed to multi billion dollar recommendation algos that are designed to exploit human psychology for engagement metrics that get boosted whenever people feel inflamed or ashamed. I feel like we are going to look back in 20 years and see this paradigm as bad as letting cigarettes advertise to kids
Thank you. At the end of the day social media and the Internet are just tools. The constant exposure to the gamification of human psychology for profit is harmful to all of us and children are less capable of breaking free of it.